Private MD News

Group blasts new prostate cancer testing guidelines

Category: Prostate

Last month, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force issued a recommendation that doctors stop administering PSA testing to healthy men with few risk factors for prostate cancer. This caused an immediate reaction from experts in the field.

The latest warning comes from the American Urological Association. The group says the recommendations send the wrong message to men and fails to recognized the importance of early diagnosis in successfully treating prostate cancer.

"Telling men not to get tested for prostate cancer will move us backward, not forward," Sushil S. Lacy, president of the association. "Instead, our approach should involve screening a more focused, healthy population, with a contemporary discussion of all therapeutic options."

Lacy said that the matter really comes down to early detection. With regular PSA testing, prostate tumors are generally found at an earlier stage when they are more treatable. However, when a man rarely gets tested, cancer has a chance to grow and spread to other areas of the body, which is when it becomes most deadly.

The association sent a letter to the task force asking it to reconsider its recommendations.