If you’re a male, and a Woody Allen-like hypochondriac (like me), perhaps you feel anxiety each year when you go to get your PSA blood test.
Today the NY Times reports on a big study that suggests that all that screening does little good. One doctor, speaking to the Times, said the benefits of PSA testing are “modest at best and with a greater downside than any other cancer we screen for.”
It was once believed that the PSA test would cut prostate cancer deaths for men by half, but the actual result of the study suggests that:
[T]he number of lives saved was small — seven fewer prostate cancer deaths for every 10,000 men screened and followed for nine years.
Prometheus Unbound 