USPSTF makes unsophisticated ?final? decision about role of PSA ...

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Sitemaster

According to an article in? today?s Annals of Internal Medicine, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force or USPSTF has confirmed its prior draft recommendation against all ?routine? use of PSA testing for risk of prostate cancer, stating that??This recommendation applies to men in the general U.S. population, regardless of age.?

This issue of the journal also contains:

This is clearly not going to be the end of this debate.

The ?New? Prostate Cancer InfoLink believes, as does Prostate Cancer International and other members of the Prostate Cancer Roundtable, that there is a clear distinction between the appropriate use of the PSA test to assess risk of prostate cancer, the level of that risk in certain subsets of the population, and the management of prostate cancer once it is diagnosed. We have long argued that annual, mass, population-based ?screening? of all men for risk of prostate cancer with the PSA test cannot be justified ? but neither can a blanket recommendation against the use of the PSA test to assess risk.

The members of the Prostate Cancer Roundtable issued a detailed media release this afternoon in response to the USPSTF decision. The media release includes the following statement from Thomas Farrington,?president of the Prostate Health Education Network: ?The USPSTF continues to ignore the benefits of screening for men known to be at high risk, including African American men, men with a family history, veterans exposed to Agent Orange, and men with an above-average baseline PSA in their 40s.?

We simply don?t live in a black and white world, and assessment of risk for prostate cancer very definitely comes with shades of grey!

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Filed under: Diagnosis, Risk Tagged: | PSA, risk, screening, USPSTF

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