Annual PSA prostate cancer screening may be particularly important for Black men, suggests a new study of 45,834 veterans, aged 55–69 years, who were diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2004 and 2017.
The study found that annual prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening significantly reduced the risk of dying from prostate cancer among Black men but not White men. The mortality rate for Black men who underwent had annual PSA screening was 4.7 percent, but it was 7.3 percent for those who didn’t get this screening every year.
“A shorter screening interval may be valuable for detecting aggressive disease, which is more common in Black men,” said the researchers, led by University of California, San Diego, radiation oncology resident Michael Sherer, MD.
“Given that Black men are younger at diagnosis and have worse prostate cancer survival compared with White men,” more intensive screening recommendations “may benefit Black patients,” they concluded.
- See “Annual PSA Screening Important for Black Men” by M. Alexander Otto on the Medscpae website (August 26, 2022)
- See the abstract of the scientific paper “Association Between Prostate-Specific Antigen Screening and Prostate Cancer Mortality Among Non-Hispanic Black and Non-Hispanic White US Veterans” by Michael V Sherer et al.
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