Risultati per: Screening del cancro alla prostata

Screening plus explicit feedback to patients and clinicians didn’t appear to improve outcomes.

This preliminary descriptive report compares the detection rates of high-grade and low-grade prostate cancer in men invited for prostate cancer screening vs those of the control group not offered screening.

The introduction of prostate-specific antigen (PSA)–based screening for prostate cancer in the early 1990s was followed by a nearly 2-decade long decline in prostate cancer metastasis and mortality. However, clinical trial data revealed that screening was associated with substantial harms. Under the traditional clinical approach in which elevated serum PSA triggered prostate biopsy, roughly 1 in 5 screened men underwent biopsies, with more than 75% found to be negative and a majority of positive biopsies harboring low-grade, clinically insignificant cancers. Prostate biopsies are uncomfortable for patients and carry a risk of bleeding and infection requiring hospitalization. Moreover, during a previous era in which a cancer diagnosis was inexorably linked to treatment, overdiagnosis (ie, detection of indolent cancers that would not have been detected during life in the absence of screening) and overtreatment resulted in significantly reduced quality of life. In 2012, the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) provided a grade D recommendation against the use of PSA screening, concluding that the benefits of PSA-based screening for prostate cancer do not outweigh the harms.

This secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial assesses whether screening for prostate-specific antigen reduces prostate cancer mortality at 15-year follow-up.