More frequent PSA screenings offer no benefit over yearly exams for prostate cancer
Results of a study presented early this month at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference in Chicago suggest men who have undergone treatment for prostate cancer can rest easy knowing annual screenings are sufficient to monitor the disease.
Research led by University of North Carolina Lineberger’s Ronald Chen, MD, MPH, an associate professor in the UNC School of Medicine Department of Radiology Oncology, found that men who were screened every three months for prostate cancer post-treatment saw no added benefits over yearly screenings when it came to overall survival.
“This suggests that for prostate cancer patients, once-a-year monitoring may be enough,” Chen said in a release from UNC. “This is not a surprising finding, because prostate cancer is a slow-growing disease.”
Chen’s team analyzed a group of nearly 10,500 prostate cancer patients in the U.S. for their research, all of whom underwent prostate-specific antigen testing after their cancer treatment. Roughly half of the researchers’ study population received primary radiotherapy, while the other half had radical prostatectomies.
Routine monitoring of the disease at this stage is critical, Chen said, but national guidelines haven’t reached a consensus as to how often those check-ins should take place.
Study co-author Ramsankar Basak, PhD, said in the release that these results could have implications not only for clinical guidelines, but also for quality of patient care, since it appears guidelines recommending three- to six-month PSA screenings represent an overutilization of care.
“If more frequent testing does not help patients live longer, then it can actually harm the patient in terms of the cost of testing and causing stress and anxiety,” Basak said. “We hope that results of this study will help change future guidelines on monitoring of prostate cancer patients after treatment.”
The authors’ work was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology this June.
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.