Questions Dog Guidelines on Prostate Cancer Drug

Every year, about 30,000 men die of prostate cancer in the United States. Also every year, just under 200,000 men are told that they have prostate cancer. Many of those men are treated with a prostatectomy, surgical removal of the prostate that very often causes lots of collateral damage–impotence, urinary incontinence, and other unpleasantness. As this piece reports, some estimates indicate that for every 20 to 100 men treated with a prostatectomy, one life is saved.
Now medical experts are suggesting a prophylactic treatment for the one cancer that some people think is  overtreated. A new set of guidelines issued by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Urological Association advises men who have not been diagnosed with prostate cancer talk to their doctors about  5-alpha reductase inhibitors
(5-ARI), which, a new study shows, may reduce the risk of getting prostate cancer by as much as 25 percent.
Is that a good idea? Maybe, but as this piece in the Washington Post reports, other experts have calculated that about 71 men would have to take the drug, at a cost of about $3 a day or around
$1,080 a year, for seven years, to prevent
one case of prostate cancer. What makes the cost-effectiveness calculations especially problematic, the Post reports,
is that many cases of prostate cancer are best left ignored; they are
innocuous and unlikely to kill a man unless he lives to be 200.
Confused yet? Would you take the drug?  Read more in the Washington Post.