Screening the over- 50s for prostate cancer ‘pointless’

By: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2012; Doi: 10.1093/jnci/djr500

A New study has concluded that screening guidelines are getting it wrong: men who are 50 years and older don’t benefit from regular prostate cancer screening.

            Most of the cancers grow so slowly that their detection doesn’t make any difference to how long men will live.

            The new study goes against current medical thinking, which recommends that all men over the age of 50 should be screed regularly, possibly every year.

             Instead, say researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine, only men in their 40s should have a one- off test for PSA (prostate specific antigen, a marker of the disease) Those with a low PSA score are very unlikely to develop lethal prostate cancer, and so probably don’t need to be screened again.

            They based their recommendation on a study of more than 76,000 men, aged between 55 and 74, who were screened annually for six years. Although regular screening picked up more prostate tumors, there was no difference in the rate of death between men who were screened and other men who had not been screened.

            Men diagnosed with prostate cancer who had a history of heart- disease, stroke, diabetes, other cancers or lung or liver disease were far more likely to die from one of the other conditions.