EFN

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner announced Monday that he has been diagnosed with an early stage of prostate cancer.

“In late July, during a routine checkup, my PSA (prostate-specific antigen) levels were found to be high, which can be an indicator of prostate cancer,” Sensenbrenner said. “After some additional testing was conducted, the doctor confirmed that I have an early stage of prostate cancer.

Sensenbrenner’s treatments will begin radiation therapy, he said. According to his doctor, the cure rate for Sensenbrenner’s cancer is 85 to 95 percent.

Are prostate cancer screenings really helping?

Routine screening for prostate cancer has led to more than 1,000,000 US men being diagnosed as having a tumor who might instead have suffered no sick effects from them, US analysts said on Monday. The report, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, supplies the first numerical anwser about how the prostate-specific antigen test has led straight to a massive over-diagnosis of safe cancers that wouldn’t have spread outside of the prostate.

The team looked to find out how many men have been diagnosed as having prostate cancer since the introduction in 1986 of a generally used blood test for prostate cancers that looked for a prostate-cancer precise antigen, or PSA.

The average age at diagnosis reduced from about 72 years in 1988-1989 to about 67 years in 2004-2005 and the rate of late-stage cases slid from about 53 to eight per 100,000 among whites and from 91 to thirteen per 100,000 among blacks.