THE "NEW" PROSTATE CANCER INFOLINK

A new article just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine has suggested that PSA testing really does save lives. But the new article isn’t based on any really new data.

We are currently trying to obtain a copy of the article to review it with care, but it basically seems to be a statistical re-analysis of data from the ERSPC and the PLCO trials.

We aren’t going to comment on it until we have had a chance to actually read the whole paper with care, but in the interim some readers might like to review the following:

• The abstract of the actual paper by Tsodikov et al.
• An editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine by Andrew Vickers (but just the first paragraph)
• This commentary on the Reuters web site
• This article in the Los Angeles Times
• This article in The New York Times

What is already apparent is the importance of what people actually mean by the terms “screening” and “testing”, and what one actually does as a consequence of the results of such tests. That’s hardly a big surprise.

Filed under: Diagnosis, Risk | Tagged: PSA, screening, testing |