Faculty Opinions Recommendation of Screening for Prostate Cancer
TLDR Prostate cancer screening doesn't significantly reduce death rates and has risks like overdiagnosis and side effects.
The Cochrane review from 2013 concluded that prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening did not reduce prostate cancer-specific or overall mortality, based on a meta-analysis of five randomized controlled trials involving 341,342 men aged 45-80 with follow-ups of 7-20 years. While PSA screening increased the number of diagnosed cases and detected cancer at earlier stages, it also led to significant adverse events such as false positives, anxiety, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment. The review highlighted the limitation of existing studies, which predominantly involved European populations, cautioning against generalizing findings to populations with higher prostate cancer incidence and worse prognosis, such as black men.
