Screening all men for prostate cancer using the prostate screening antigen test (PSA) may not, in some instances, be beneficial, according to a new study.
In two separate reports published on the British Medical Journal (BMJ) website, European researchers found the inability of the PSA, to differentiate between fatal and harmless prostate cancers makes it unusable as a population wide screening tool.
“Our findings strongly indicate that, in addition to PSA, further biomarkers are needed before inferring population-based screening for prostate cancer,” said Benny Holmstrom, a urologist with Gavle Hospital in Gavle, Sweden, and lead author of the first study.
In another report of past studies and current PSA guidelines published in the same issue of BMJ, a research team in the U.S. also discovered that PSA screening could not differentiate between harmless and lethal prostate cancer. They surmised that evidence about the costs and benefits of PSA screening is insufficient to support its general use.
Prostate specific antigen is a substance that is made by the prostate gland. High amounts of PSA in your blood could be a sign of cancer. However high PSA does not always mean cancer.
Prostate cancer affects 679,000 men and causes 221,000 deaths around the world annually, according to a global estimate published in 2005.
I don’t get it. No one basis a diagnosis on a PSA reading. Use of the PSA now incorporates PSA velocity, free PSA, etc. But in any case the most that would happen next would be a biopsy — and then analysis could begin. But without PSA many would not go to the next step and their cancers would remain undetected. In some cases this wouldn’t matter , but in others the cancer, which could have been detected, would metasticize.