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May 22nd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, May 22 (HealthDay News) — Although a U.S. advisory
panel no longer recommends that men routinely undergo prostate cancer
screening with a PSA blood test, men should ask their doctors for the exam
if they’re uncomfortable without monitoring, health experts say.
Urologists and cancer experts dismissed the idea that the U.S.
Preventive Services Task Force’s criticism of the PSA test will set a
man’s personal agenda or interfere with doctor-patient relationships. They
acknowledged, however, that health insurers are likely to take notice of
the new recommendation, released May 22 in the journal Annals of
Internal Medicine, and potentially alter coverage of the screening
test.
In abandoning earlier guidelines that called for screening to start at
50, the task force said the PSA test does more harm than good, resulting
in overdiagnosis of many slow-growing cancers while prompting aggressive
treatment that can leave men impotent or incontinent. The test measures
blood levels of prostate-specific antigen, a protein produced by the
prostate gland.
Judicious use of potentially risky tests and treatments can help
mitigate those problems, said Dr. Sandip Prasad, a urologic oncology
research fellow at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“As we adopt smarter treatment strategies … the goal is always to
identify men who are going to die of prostate cancer. Taking away the PSA
reduces our ability to do that,” Prasad said. “Most of us are very open
with our patients about the limits of PSA testing. Screening doesn’t have
to get this big ball rolling that takes you to the bottom of a hill.”
About 28,000 American men will die of prostate cancer — the second
most common malignancy in men — this year, according to the U.S. National
Cancer Institute. Despite the PSA test’s high false-positive rate, which
can trigger painful and unnecessary biopsies, no other reliable screening
test exists to detect prostate cancer.
Patients should discuss any concerns about testing — or not testing —
with their doctor, experts said.
Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society,
said better tests to determine not only the presence of prostate cancer
but each case’s true threat to patients have been held back from
development because of the fixation on PSA testing. But Brawley and other
experts said such future tests will likely focus on the specific genes at
play in the malignancy.
“Truth be told, prostate cancer screening as a whole, and its progress,
has been delayed because so many people have been adamant about doing PSA
screening in the last 20 years and not assessing if it works,” Brawley
said.
Prasad called it “stunning” that imaging tests such as CT or MRI scans
aren’t often used to detect prostate cancer, as they are for many other
malignancies.
“If we go back to diagnosing with symptoms … it seems like a
tremendous step backward,” he said.
“Without the PSA, obviously we will diagnose fewer and fewer men,”
Prasad added. “But for the guys [in which] you pick it up five, seven or
10 years earlier, you can save their life. As physicians, we’re called on
to do that as best we can.”
A better test will come, Brawley said, noting that “the science has
advanced so much in the last five years.”
Dr. Anthony D’Amico, chief of radiation oncology at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital in Boston, said pathology guidelines are needed that would better
identify aggressive prostate cancers from less harmful versions.
“PSA diagnoses every cancer that walks, and not every prostate cancer
that walks needs to be cured,” he said. “The solution lies at the level of
the pathologist… We need to sit down with them and come up with
guidelines [about what constitutes high-grade prostate cancer]. It can be
done, but it needs to be worked on.”
Until then, some physicians fear that insurance companies will cut off
coverage of the PSA test, creating a devastating disparity between those
who can afford to pay for it out of pocket and those who can’t. The latter
group likely will include minorities and senior citizens, who already are
at higher risk for developing prostate cancer.
“Older black and Hispanic men are going to have increases in prostate
cancer because they won’t have the opportunity for early detection,”
D’Amico said. “So I think we should screen high-risk populations, because
we know who they are.”
More information
To learn more about the PSA test, visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
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