New York, December 05: The number of prostate cancers diagnosed in UK men each year would jump from 30,000 to 160,000 if the country introduced population-wide screening for the disease, new research shows. However, many of those cancers are low-risk and may not lead to death.
Something similar happened in the United States in the mid-1990s, when giving men prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood tests to detect the disease became standard practice, Professor David E Neal of the University of Cambridge, one of the new study’s authors, said.
“There was an epidemic of prostate cancer in America,” he said. “The number of cases virtually tripled in five years.”
But many of the cancers detected by PSA testing are slow-growing and may be managed best by “active monitoring or surveillance,” rather than radiation or surgery, which can seriously impact a man’s quality of life by causing incontinence, impotence, and other side effects, he added. “What we don’t want to do is to treat a man at 65 who is destined to die at 85 of a stroke,” Neal said.
Neal and his colleagues are currently conducting a huge study in which they’ve offered prostate cancer screening to a quarter of a million men 50 to 69 years old, roughly half of whom have chosen to take the test. About 10 percent of these men had high PSA levels, while roughly a quarter of these men actually had cancer.
Among the cancers the researchers identified, about 12 percent were locally aggressive, having spread beyond the prostate gland, and about a third were extremely low-risk.
–Agencies