MEN'S HEALTH Study shows test misses some cancer

Prostate cancer hits 16 percent of American men. The death risk is 3 percent.
BOSTON (AP) -- A new study shows that a test widely used to screen for prostate cancer misses 15 percent of the tumors -- including some aggressive ones -- in older men.
The findings have sparked vigorous debate among doctors on how to interpret results of the PSA test.
Some experts such as Dr. H. Ballentine Carter think the threshold for what constitutes normal on the PSA test should be lowered, at least in some cases. "We desperately need a new marker to tell us who needs to be treated aggressively," said Carter, a prostate cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Another view
But others -- Dr. Leonard Gomella, for one -- say that could lead to more unnecessary operations in the many men whose tumors are so slow-growing that something else will kill them before the cancer ever does.
"It's a very powerful test, but it's not perfect," said Gomella, a urologist at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
Sixteen percent of American men can expect to be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lives. Yet most such tumors grow slowly, with the death risk at just 3 percent.
Current screening methods cannot always establish whether cancer is present and dangerous, so some cases are missed and others are overtreated with surgery or radiation.
The study, conducted with the help of funding and personnel from the National Cancer Institute, appears in today's New England Journal of Medicine.