Study Measures Overdiagnosis of Prostate Cancer

This year, more than 186,000 U.S. men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Nearly 29,000 will die from the disease. Doctors have known for a long time that many men who are diagnosed have  tumors that are too slow-growing to ever be a
threat. They have also known that there’s no definitive study demonstrating that early detection saves lives. Yet many doctors, for reasons that often remain mysterious to their patients, rush patients to treatments that could leave them impotent or incontinent, or both.
Now comes a new study by
researchers at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, that attempts measure the extent of overdiagnosis. The Associated Press reports that the Dutch researchers tracked prostate cancer diagnosed in U.S.
men ages 54 to 80 between 1985 and 2000, and used three different
models developed by cancer centers to more accurately estimate
overdiagnosis. Depending on how it’s calculated, anywhere from 23
percent to 42 percent of PSA-detected cancers would otherwise never
have been detected in the man’s lifetime. What to do? Many doctors advise watchful waiting, and powerful hoping that better tests will soon emerge that can tell us which cancers are dangerous and which are not.
Read more from the Associated Press.