Fewer Men Are Getting Prostate Cancer Blood Tests, And That May Not Be a Good Thing

Health advice is often confusing — and conflicting — and nothing proves that better than recommendations about prostate cancer screening. The prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test can pick up early signs of tumors in the prostate, but it’s not 100% reliable. And prostate tumors tend to be slow growing and less aggressive than other types of tumors, so more than half of older men will have prostate tumors but will likely die of something other than prostate cancer.

“There are two ways to see PSA screening,” says Dr. Quoc-Dien Trinh, a urologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and an author of one of the studies. “On one side of the fence, prostate cancer is over diagnosed, and you need to treat a lot of men to save one life. But there is also no doubt that if you stop PSA screening, what kinds of prostate cancer are you going to find? Most likely late stage cancers that have metastasized to the bone and are causing pain and bone fractures.”

Source: TIME Health