Prostate test a “coin toss”
The doctor who developed the blood test used to detect prostate cancer 40 years ago has now said it had become a “hugely expensive public health disaster” and should be abandoned although Australian doctors still support the value of a PSA test.
Dr Richard Ablin wrote in The New York Times that the prostate-specific antigen test – used by about one million Australians a year – had been proven inaccurate and was “hardly more effective than a coin toss”.
“PSA testing can’t detect prostate cancer and, more important, it can’t distinguish between the two types of prostate cancer – the one that will kill you and the one that won’t,” said Dr Ablin.
But the director of Sydney’s St Vincent’s Prostate Cancer Clinic, Phillip Stricker, said that “the PSA test does pick up cancers in their early stages. It hasn’t been the blockbuster we thought it might, but there is evidence that it does good if used intelligently”.
An American survey of 77,000 men concluded there was no decrease in the death rate in those who had yearly tests compared with those who were not offered testing.
In a European trial involving 182,000 men it was found that the death rate did decline slightly.
