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Why the prostate cancer test is useless

By Kyle Smith

March 1, 2014 | 11:15pm

“The Great Prostate Hoax: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster” by Richard J. Ablin and Ronald Piana

Middle-aged men know the story: the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test is an essential early-warning system for cancer. Elevated PSA levels mean cancer, which in turn means you should probably make the gutsy but necessary decision to prolong your life by having your prostate removed.

Except this story is rubbish. Says who? Says the pathologist who first observed the PSA, back in 1970.

Despite losing his own father, agonizingly, to prostate cancer at age 67, Richard J. Ablin (who is in his 70s) hasn’t had a PSA test done on himself, and doesn’t intend to. There is, he says, no reason to do so on a healthy man, he explains in his book “The Great Prostate Hoax.” Because PSA, contrary to what you’ve been told, doesn’t work as a cancer indicator.

That’s why a New England Journal of Medicine joint study of results from the US and Europe concluded, “PSA-based screening results in small or no reduction in prostate cancer-specific mortality.” Two years later the US Preventive Services Task Force declared that healthy men should not have a routine PSA test.

Look at it this way: If you had a PSA test in 2009, and it led to a biopsy, a cancer diagnosis and treatment for that cancer, there is, according to Dr. Peter Bach, a health-care policy specialist at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a 1 in 50 chance that by 2019 or later, you will have been saved from dying of prostate cancer. But there is a 49 in 50 chance that you will have been treated unnecessarily.

Read at: http://nypost.com/2014/03/01/why-the-prostate-cancer-test-is-useless/