Annual Prostate Cancer Screening Test Appears to Save Lives

October 20, 2005. -- Men diagnosed with prostate cancer who previously underwentyearly blood tests to measure prostate specific antigen levels are nearly three times less likely to die from prostate cancer than those who don't have annual screenings, according to a new study from Harvard.

Compared to men diagnosed with prostate cancer without previous annual PSA screening, men who took the yearly blood test had a less aggressive form of the disease at diagnosis -- translating into a threefold reduction in the likelihood of death when compared with patients who had never been received a screening.

"A simple blood test called PSA may decrease deaths from prostate cancer because it appears to discover prostate cancers at a more curable time," said study author Dr. Jason Efstathiou, of the department of radiation oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston.

Efstathiou and his team studied medical records of 1,492 men who were treated for prostate cancer by surgical removal of the prostate and whose cancer came back. All the men were treated at some point between 1988 (when surgery was the leading treatment for prostate cancer) and 2002. This gave a period long enough to catch recurrence and to record deaths that occurred.

Among this group, 841 men had yearly PSA tests before their cancer diagnosis, while 611 men were diagnosed by other methods.

The study shows that over an estimated 10-year period, men who have an annual prostate specific antigen (PSA) test will have a 3.6 percent chance of dying from the disease, compared to 11.3 percent in the general population.

Patients who have the test are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer that is curable in the vast majority of cases, as opposed to aggressive cancers that are less likely to be curable.

"The PSA blood test is the best simple screening test available for prostate cancer that picks up prostate cancer earlier, while it's still curable," Efstathiou said.

Large, randomized trials currently going on in both the U.S. and Europe will bring more evidence as to whether PSA screening tests save lives. Both of those large radnomised trials are expected to report their results some time between now and 2008.

SOURCES: Jason Efstathiou, M.D. Ph.D., department of radiation oncology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston.

esentation, American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, annual meeting, Denver