Older Doctors May Do More Prostate Cancer Tests on Old Men

Despite U.S. guidelines recommending against prostate cancer screening in elderly men, many specialists and older physicians still do these tests, a recent study suggests.

In 2008, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a government-backed panel of independent physicians, recommended against routine prostate cancer tests for men at least 75 years old or with a limited life expectancy. They cited concerns that widespread screening often caught harmless tumors that didn’t need treatment and led to unnecessary procedures with side effects like impotence and incontinence.

Disagreement among doctors about who should and shouldn’t get the PSA test still contributes to a variation in practice patterns, said Dr. Quoc-Dien Trinh, a urologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston who wasn’t involved in the study.

Source: REUTERS HEALTH NEWS