Screening with a PSA test has a small impact on prostate cancer deaths but leads to overdiagnosis, finds study
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-screening-psa-small-impact-prostate.html
Excerpt:
The largest study to date investigating a single invitation to a PSA blood test to screen for prostate cancer has found it had a small impact on reducing deaths, but also led to overdiagnosis and missed early detection of some aggressive cancers.
The CAP trial, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and carried out by researchers from the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, involved over 400,000 men aged 50-69. Just under half received a single invitation for a PSA test as part of the trial.
After following up for 15 years, there was a small difference in the number of men who died from prostate cancer between the two groups—nearly 7 men out of every 1,000 in the group invited for screening had died from prostate cancer, compared to nearly 8 men out of every 1,000 in the group who hadn’t been invited for screening.
The results of the trial show that an estimated 1 in 6 cancers found by the single PSA screening were overdiagnosed.
Cancer Research UK warns that overdiagnosis of prostate cancer is the main worry with PSA testing for early detection. This can result in the unnecessary treatment of cancers that would not have caused any harm in someone’s lifetime.
.....Professor Richard Martin, lead author and Cancer Research UK scientist at the University of Bristol, said, “Our studies have been measuring the effectiveness of the PSA test with hundreds of thousands of men for 15 years. The key takeaway is that the small reduction in prostate cancer deaths by using the test to screen healthy men does not outweigh the potential harms.