Older men like me are routinely given a PSA test for prostate cancer as part of our check-ups. My numbers fluctuated from year to year. Some years my number would rise slightly and my physician would alert me to it, but the next year it would drop. I never did anything about it since I was not convinced that the tests were conclusive enough. Now a new study seems to indicate that my skepticism was justified, since the PSA seems to have high levels of false negatives and even higher levels of false positives.
This latest study was carried out in Norrkoping in Sweden. It followed 9,026 men who were in their 50s or 60s in 1987.
Nearly 1,500 men were randomly chosen to be screened every three years between 1987 and 1996. The first two tests were performed by digital rectal examination and then by prostate specific antigen testing.
The report concludes: “After 20 years of follow-up, the rate of death from prostate cancer did not differ significantly between men in the screening group and those in the control group.”
The favoured method of screening is the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test.
However, around 15% of men with normal PSA levels will have prostate cancer and two-thirds of men with high levels of PSA do not in fact have prostate cancer.
One study has suggested that to prevent one death from prostate cancer you would have to screen 1,410 men and treat 48 of them. (My italics)
As another aging male, this is a topic much on my mind of late. I recently underwent a prostate biopsy because of a mildly elevated PSA level; thankfully it was negative. But I have been doing the same kind of reading that Mano has, and I had already decided that if the biopsy were to detect a small, low-grade tumor, I would be in no hurry at all to agree to a treatment which would have stood an excellent chance of being worse than the disease. (Still, I’m glad I had the biopsy.)
The PSA test is highly controversial and any male that is contemplating undergoing the test needs to read all the pros and cons before taking that step. Every male’s history is different but in my case the test has created a lot of mental anguish. Checkout Dr. Richard Ablin’s website. Dr. Ablin was the discoverer of PSA. http://www.prostatefoundation.org/loop_psa.htm
Thank you for noticing it. I´m in my fities and wonder too. I guess is best to see other sypmtoms.