A big study of men in Europe gives mixed results about prostate cancer screening that may do little to change minds about its value.
The study finds that PSA blood tests every four years seem to cut the risk of death from prostate cancer. But it also finds that screening makes no difference in overall mortality rates because most men die of other causes — not their prostate tumors.
The results underscore a frustrating truth about this disease: most prostate cancers grow too slowly to threaten a man's life and there is no good way to tell which ones will. Finding cancer often leads to treatments that can cause impotence, incontinence and other problems. The PSA test also is just a measure of inflammation, which can be due to many things besides cancer.
"A man needs to make a choice for himself, realizing the benefits exist in theory, but the harms have been shown in every study that we've ever done in prostate cancer," said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "If there is an overall mortality benefit from prostate screening it is very, very small."
He had no role in the study, which was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
In October, a government-appointed panel of experts, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, recommended against screening with PSA tests. Only two big studies have looked at this — a U.S. one that found annual screening did not cut prostate cancer death risk and a European one that found screening every four years did. (In Europe, prostate screening is less common and is done at wider intervals than in the United States.)
The new research is longer follow-up from the European study: 11-year results on 162,000 men ages 55 to 69. Researchers found that 1,055 men would need to be offered screening and 37 cancers would need to be detected to prevent a single death from prostate cancer. Overall death rates did not differ between the group offered screening and the group not offered it.
