Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston is criticizing a new federal recommendation to halt a widely used prostate cancer diagnostic test for healthy men, calling the recommendation “misguided."The US Preventive Services Task Force, which is an independent federal panel charged with making diagnostic recommendation, on Friday announced plans to downgrade the widely used test, called the PSA blood test.
The PSA test is commonly administered every year to men over 50. Dana-Farber says an about-face on the value of the test, without regard to individual circumstances, is a mistake.
‘PSA’ stands for prostate-specific antigen. The task force will downgrade its recommendation on the PSA test to D, meaning that it has no benefit for men under 75, from I, which stands for inconclusive. PSA screening in men over 75 already had a D rating.
“This is the wrong message at this point in time,” Dr. Philip Kantoff, MD, director of Dana-Farber’s Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology, said in a statement. “The whole issue of PSA-based screening is complex. It involves multiple steps and multiple decision points. The blanket statement of saying that PSA-based screening is of no value is the wrong message right now.”
However, Kantoff said Dana-Farber agrees that clinicians must be more careful about who is screened because not every man needs the test.
The task force had concluded that the test, “results in small or no reduction in prostate cancer–specific mortality and is associated with harms related to subsequent evaluation and treatments, some of which may be unnecessary.” The panel said unnecessary treatment for cancers that would never have become life-threatening could result in avoidable side effects to treatment, including incontinence and erectile dysfunction.
The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 240,000 cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year and that the disease will cause nearly 34,000 deaths.
