Tag Archives: PSA
Prostate Cancer Screening Recommendations Change Yet Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 29th October 2019The US Preventive Services Task Force is as fickle an organization as can be found in medicine. Consider their position about prostate cancer it seems to change more often than an infant’s diaper. Their latest pronunciamento on the subject is summarized below. Their full statement is at the end of this piece. Part of the…
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Materia Medica
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th May 2018Two new studies that reinforce old points. The first is from the JAMA (Effect of a Low-Intensity PSA-Based Screening Intervention on Prostate Cancer Mortality ): Question What is the effect of an invitation to a single prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening on prostate cancer detection and median 10-year prostate cancer mortality? Findings In this randomized clinical trial comparing men aged…
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Prostate Cancer Mortality
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 20th July 2012A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes: Among men with localized prostate cancer detected during the early era of PSA testing, radical prostatectomy did not significantly reduce all-cause or prostate-cancer mortality, as compared with observation, through at least 12 years of follow-up. This will come as no surprise to readers of this site. The…
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Prostate Cancer Redux – Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 17th March 2012Even Scientific American has gotten into the act. An article by Harvard oncologist Marc B Garnick says, “Evidence shows that screening [for prostate cancer] does more harm than good.” Go here for an interview with Dr Garnick. Why this great awakening about the unsatisfactory effects of PSA screening? It’s the result of reality seepage and the…
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Cancer Society Stops Urging Doctors to Offer PSA Test
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 4th March 2010The American Cancer Society has finally joined just about every other organization that makes screening recommendations. It now warns about the limitations of the PSA test for prostate cancer. This subject has been covered repeatedly here so I won’t repeat myself. The problem is that PSA testing yields many false positives and identifies “cancers” that…
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The Limitations of Cancer Screening
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 1st November 2009A recent article in the JAMA has received a lot of coverage in the lay press. It analyzes screening for breast and prostate cancer. Critics of both screening tests (including me) have, over many years, pointed out the problems inherent in screening for any disease, but most specifically these two. We mostly have been ignored….
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PSA Screening
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 9th October 2009Below is an excerpt from an email sent out a few days ago by the American College of Physicians. It tells doctors that they should discuss the implications of PSA screening before offering the test to their patients. Why they are so far behind the curve is hard to understand. Here’s what I said on…
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Screening for Prostate Cancer – Yet Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 20th March 2009It seems to be impossible to drive a stake through the heart of this issue. The current New England Journal of Medicine has two more studies and an editorial on the subject. One (Mortality Results from a Randomized Prostate-Cancer Screening Trial) concludes “that prostate-cancer screening provided no reduction in death rates at 7 years and…
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Screening for Prostate Cancer – Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 8th August 2008I’ve already reviewed this topic in an earlier post, but it keeps coming back. The Aug 5, 2008 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine contains two papers dealing with this issue. The first presents Screening for Prostate Cancer: US Preventative Services Task Force Recommendation. It concludes what has been obvious to those not carried…
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