I learned a new word this week: pseudoepidemic. That’s what happens when people start looking really hard for a disease that didn’t get much attention earlier, and then–not surprisingly–the disease suddenly becomes much more prevalent.
This is precisely what happened with prostate cancer in the early 1990s, just after screening tests for prostate-specific antigen (PSA) became widely available. As explained by NIH’s Paul Pinsky and colleagues in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine this week, prostate cancer rates rose from 135 (cases per year, per 100,000 men) in 1988 to 220 in 1992, a 63% increase in just four years. Rates slowly dropped after that, but they remained above 150 through 2009.