Does PSA Testing for Prostate Cancer Save Lives?
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed non-skin cancer in men. Approximately 190,000 new cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and nearly 30,000 American men die of this form of cancer each year, making prostate cancer the second most common cause of cancer death in men (lung cancer, a nearly completely preventable form of cancer, remains the most common cause of cancer death in both men and women). Therefore, according to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1 in every 6 American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lifetimes, while 1 out of every 35 men will die of this disease. The death rate due to prostate cancer began to decline in the early 1990s, at about the same time that prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing became common in the United States. While, few experts dispute that using the PSA test to screen for prostate cancer has dramatically improved our ability to diagnose prostate cancer at a much
