Benefits of prostate cancer screening should outweigh risks

It is hard to imagine that screening for early detection of prostate cancer could be harmful to certain individuals.

Earlier this month the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that routine prostate cancer screening be discontinued for men who reach 75 years old, though that suggestion is controversial. Prostate cancer is unique because it may take several years to progress from a single cell into a full-blown cancer that causes symptoms or becomes life-threatening.

The concerns about doing prostate cancer screening is related to potential harm of further tests and treatment, which your doctor usually obtains after having abnormal screening test. Potential side effects of the treatment are impotence, urinary incontinence and death. Therefore, it is important to have guidelines for doctors and patients to weight risks and benefits of screening test before they have one.

A good screening test is able to detect disease at an early stage and early treatment should result in reduction of risk of death. There is a general consensus that the prostate cancer screening test can detect cancer at an early stage. But there has been a long standing controversy as to whether or not the early diagnosis of prostate cancer does always help to reduce risk of death. The reason is that some of the early, slow growing prostate cancers may not cause any symptoms or even death.