Drop in Prostate Cancer screening

After U.S. guidelines advised against routine tests, declines in prostate cancer screening have been sharper among primary care doctors than urologists, according to a new study that suggests the medical community remains divided over the best way to look for these tumors.
In late 2011, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a government-backed panel of independent physicians, recommended against routine prostate cancer tests for all men. They cited concerns that widespread screening often caught harmless tumors that didn't need treatment and led to unnecessary procedures with side effects like impotence and incontinence.
The next year, testing rates for prostate cancer among men aged 50 to 74 years old dropped to about 16 percent among primary care physicians, from roughly 37 percent in 2010 before new guidelines took effect.
But among urologists, use of the test for a substance in the blood called prostate-specific antigen (PSA) decreased only about 4 percentage points to about 35 percent over the same period, researchers report in JAMA Internal Medicine.
"There is much evidence that men with limited life expectancy do not benefit from PSA testing, and I think experts can agree on that," said senior study author Dr. Quoc-Dien Trinh, a urologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"The rest is a matter of opinions and expert panels," Trinh added. "I do feel strongly that some men are more at risk of prostate cancer and I'm concerned about what will happen to these men given the current USPSTF recommendations and trends in PSA testing."