Prostate Cancer Screening Can Lead to Overtreatment
A common prostate cancer screening may mean treatment in men who do not need it.
July 26, 2010— -- Many men being treated aggressively for low-grade prostate cancer -- particularly if it was detected during prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening -- are unlikely to benefit from the intervention, a new study suggests.
Men with screen-detected cancer and PSA levels below 4 ng/mL were less likely to have high-grade tumors, disease outside the prostate, or tumors larger than 0.5 cubic centimeters.
Yet, they were nearly 1.5 times more likely to undergo radical prostatectomy than men who had prostate cancer that was not detected by screening, Yu-Hsuan Shao of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick and colleagues reported in the July 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. They were also more likely to have radiation therapy.
Although the relative five-year survival for prostate cancer increased from 69 percent in 1975 to nearly 99 percent in 2003, concerns about overdiagnosis and overtreatment have arisen.
Because little is known about the risk profile of men whose PSA is below 4 ng/mL, Shao and colleagues looked at data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, which includes approximately one-quarter of the U.S. population.
Among 123,934 men who received a diagnosis of prostate cancer from 2004 to 2006, 14 percent had PSA values below 4 ng/mL, 73.5 percent were between 4.1 and 20 ng/mL, and 12.5 percent had levels above 20 ng/mL.
Approximately 54 percent of patients with PSA levels below 4 ng/mL had low-risk cancers, with risk being determined according to clinical stage, PSA level, and Gleason score, compared with 48 percent of those whose PSA levels were between 4.1 and 10 ng/mL.
A total of 44 percent of men whose PSA was lower than 4 ng/mL had a radical prostatectomy, as did 38 percent of those whose levels were 4.1 to 10 ng/mL and 24 percent of those whose values were between 10.1 and 20 ng/mL.
Radiation was given to 33 percent, 40 percent, and 41.3 percent of the three groups, respectively.
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