The USPSTF recommends that, to reduce the risk of false positives and unnecessary complications from prostate cancer screening and treatment, physicians and their male patients aged 55-69 years should review together the pros and cons.
Clinicians should not conduct prostate cancer screening in men aged 55-69 years who do not ask for it (level C recommendation), according to the USPSTF recommendations, published in JAMA, which also recommend against any prostate cancer screening for men aged 70 years and older (level D recommendation). The recommendations replace those from 2012, and upgrade the statement against routine screening from a D to a C.
“The change in recommendation grade further reflects new evidence about and increased use of active surveillance of low-risk prostate cancer, which may reduce the risk of subsequent harms from screening,” according to the USPSTF.
The recommendations apply to asymptomatic adult men in the general United States population with no previous diagnosis of prostate cancer, as well as those whose ethnicity or family history put them at increased risk of death from prostate cancer.
In the evidence report published in JAMA, Joshua J. Fenton, MD, professor in the department of family and community medicine of the University of California, Davis, Sacramento, and his colleagues reviewed 63 studies comprising 1,904,950 individuals. The researchers examined the findings for information including the effectiveness of PSA screening and the potential harms associated with both screening and cancer treatment if disease was identified.
Overdiagnosis of prostate cancer ranged from 21% to 50% for cancers detected by screening, and one randomized trial of more than 1,000 men found no significant reduction in mortality for prostatectomy or radiation therapy compared with active monitoring.
Overall, men randomized to PSA screening had no significant reduction in risk of prostate cancer mortality in trials from the United States or the United Kingdom, although data from a European trial showed a significant reduction. Complications requiring hospitalization occurred in 0.5%-1.6% of men who had biopsies after screening showed abnormal results.