PSA is "removed from the menu"

Excerpt Courtesy of Associated Press

A government panel is saying PSA blood tests do more harm than good and healthy men should no longer receive the tests as part of routine cancer screening. The recommendation by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, goes against the assumption that finding cancer early is always a good thing. Not so, said Dr. Virginia Moyer of the Baylor College of Medicine, who heads the task force."We have put a huge amount of time, effort and energy into PSA screening and that time, effort and energy, that passion, should be going into finding a better test instead of using a test that doesn't work," Moyer told The Associated Press late Thursday. The task force analyzed all the previous research on this subject, including five major studies, to evaluate whether routine screening reduces deaths from prostate cancer. The conclusion: There's little if any mortality benefit. But there is harm from routine screening: impotence, incontinence, infections, even death that can come from the biopsies, surgery and radiation, Moyer said. Moyer said 30 percent of men who are treated for PSA-discovered prostate cancer suffer significant side effects, sometimes death, from the resulting treatment. About a third of men ages 40 to 60 have brewing prostate cancer but "the huge majority of them will never know it in their lifetime if they are not screened," she added.