All middle-aged men should be offered a prostate cancer test, a landmark study has concluded – just months after the idea was rejected by the Government.
According to the study, giving the proposed blood test to men over 45 was as effective at catching the disease as the breast cancer screening programme – which is widely considered a success that has saved thousands of lives.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in the UK, with 65,000 diagnoses and about 12,000 deaths annually. Despite this, it is the only major cancer without a screening programme.
The Daily Mail, along with the charity Prostate Cancer UK, has long campaigned for men to be offered regular blood tests as part of a prostate cancer screening programme.
The researchers, from Germany, analysed the health records of nearly 40,000 men who had received the blood test – known as a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test – between the ages of 45 and 50, with those of 2.8 million women, aged 50 to 69, who had undergone a routine mammogram.
They found that giving middle-aged men PSA tests identified about the same amount of cancer cases as mammograms.
In both cases, the screening tests were roughly 74 per cent accurate – meaning they were able to catch the disease three-quarters of the time.
The Daily Mail, along with the charity Prostate Cancer UK, has long campaigned for men to be offered regular blood tests
However, the PSA test was 10 per cent more likely to lead to a false positive – where it wrongly suggests the patient has cancer – than the breast screening.
Last year the UK National Screening Committee rejected calls to offer all middle-aged
men a PSA test. Health officials argued that it was not accurate enough to be used as part of a national screening programme.
Now the team behind the new study, from the German Cancer Research Centre, claim their findings show that it is no longer rational to reject prostate cancer screening on one hand while endorsing testing for breast cancer on the other.
Tobias Nordström is a clinical urologist and Associate Professor at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, said: ‘The clear overall similarities between the outcomes for breast and prostate cancer screening show that we are moving in the right direction, ensuring prostate cancer screening offers more benefits than harm.’
While Dr Sigrid Carlsson, lead author of the research, said: ‘Although our study used German data, the findings are applicable to other countries.’
However not all experts agree that the findings of the study prove that prostate cancer screening should be rolled out.
Dr Alastair Lamb, a prostate surgeon at Guys Hospital, said: ‘Breast cancer screening is an odd benchmark given that not many experts would claim breast-screening as a success.
‘Breast cancer is a symptomatic disease, so it is well suited to a screening programme. But, just like prostate cancer, most breast cancer is indolent. Giving people a diagnosis of cancer can deliver psychological harms and may alter behaviour.
‘The big difference is that breast cancer treatment itself, (e.g. surgery) rarely causes harm – although it certainly can cause aesthetic/psychological impact – whereas pretty much all prostate cancer treatment can cause many functional harms e.g. bladder/bowel/erectile dysfunction.’
He added the trial shows that prostate cancer screening ‘delivers too many false positives.’
‘The debate continues around what constitutes a life-altering diagnosis, and so it is hard to concur with the authors conclusion that their study supports implementation of prostate cancer screening,’ says Dr Lamb.
