The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended healthy men no longer receive prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood tests as part of routine prostate cancer screening. This decision is being made by a panel that does not include a urologist or medical oncologist and is chaired by a pediatrician.
In 2009, this same task force suggested mammograms were unnecessary for women ages 40-49 and recommended against teaching women to do breast self-exams.
As the Southeast’s largest urological practice and caregivers of more than 9,000 prostate cancer patients, the physicians of Georgia Urology strongly disagree with the task force’s latest findings. Since the task force considered this issue in 2009, no new research has been cited that would call for this drastic change in prostate cancer testing recommendations. In fact, the most recently published study, the Göteborg Randomized Population-based Prostate Cancer Screening Trial (Lancet Oncology, July 2010), found that with screening, deaths from prostate cancer dropped 44 percent over a 14-year period, compared to those who were not screened.
Since 1994, even with screening, the incidence of prostate cancer has remained fairly stable, while during the same time, the death rate from prostate cancer has declined by nearly 40 percent. Studies show we are now diagnosing prostate cancer at an earlier and more curable stage. We are not detecting more cancers; rather, we are catching prostate cancers earlier and saving lives.
Still, prostate cancer remains the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States. The National Cancer Institute reports that 33,720 men will die from this disease this year — more than one every 30 minutes. That number will grow if we give up our best way of detecting this disease early.
The PSA blood test is used to detect the possible presence of prostate cancer in individuals who have no symptoms. Further testing is then needed to determine a diagnosis. The PSA blood test is performed to help find a potentially deadly disease at a time when a cure is most likely. Waiting for symptoms to develop — as the task frorce suggests — almost always leads to diagnosing prostate cancer at an incurable stage.
Early detection is critical to the success of prostate cancer treatment. This recommendation puts thousands of men each year in harm’s way: those men will not be aware that they have prostate cancer until it’s too late. Adoption of these recommendations will undo more than two decades of progress and result in the needless deaths of thousands of men.
We urge you to take action. Contact your local and federal policymakers to demand the government not restrict access to life-saving testing. Please make your concerns known to them.
Treatment decisions should be determined between a man and his own doctor. The government should not be able to deny a patient’s ability and right to choose his own health care destiny.
Scott Miller is a physician with Georgia Urology specializing in laparoscopic and robotic urologic surgery.
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