Too many elderly men receive PSA testing - study
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Editor's note: The Father's Day is gone for the year, but all fathers or should we say men need to know something about the prostate cancer screening. The following report on a recent study gives readers some idea about the PSA testing.
The prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing is commonly used as a screening method to detect prostate cancer in men aged 76 or older, a new analysis by the U.S. government has revealed.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in 2008 updated prostate cancer screening guidelines to recommend against screening for prostate cancer in men aged 75 or older.
The American Cancer Society posted a press release on March 3 2010 saying men who expect to live 10 years or less don't have to bother to get prostate cancer screening because chances are good that they may die from another health condition.
Studies suggest that men aged 70 should not get prostate cancer screening as it may do more harm than good.
Li J and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assessed the status of PSA testing in the past year among 9,000 U.S. men aged 76 or older who had no history of prostate cancer. The subjects were registered in the 2006 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
Sixty percent of men reported having a PSA test in the past year, according to the study report published in the July 2010 issue of Preventing chronic disease.
The researchers found men who had health insurance, were satisfied with life or always had emotional support were more likely to receive the PSA test.
In contrast, men who had no routine health checkup, were divorced, widowed, or separated or received less than a high school education were less likely to undergo the prostate cancer screening.
The discoverer of the routine PSA screening test said in March 2010, in a commentary on the New York Times, that his method should not be used to screen prostate cancer for healthy men who have no family history of the disease because first, it cannot detect prostate cancer and second, it cannot reveal whether a prostate cancer is lethal or benign.
Dr. Richard Ablin of the University of Arizona called use of his prostate cancer screening method "a hugely expensive public health disaster" which costs the U.S. at least $3 billion each year paid mostly by Medicare and the Veterans Administration.
Dr. Ablin said, "As I've been trying to make clear for many years now, PSA testing can't detect prostate cancer" and "the test simply reveals how much of the prostate antigen a man has in his blood."
Prostate cancer is diagnosed in about 190,000 men each year in the United States and the disease kills about 35,000 annually in the country, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The disease in many cases are not as lethal as many other types of cancer.
For more information on the PSA testing, read here.
For information regarding prostate cancer prevention, read here
David Liu
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