New PSA testing recommendations worries prostate cancer advocates

The prostate-specific antigen test is usually the first indicator that something is wrong with a man’s prostate, but new recommendations by the Canadian Task Force on Preventative Health Care suggest doing away with the test as a screening tool for the disease.

Peter Mallette, a prostate cancer survivor and the executive director of Prostate Cancer Canada in the Atlantic region, says that is concerning.

“What men don’t need is another excuse and another reason not to pay attention to their prostate health and certainly, these recommendations do that,” says Mallette.

Six years ago, Mark Healy was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was 47, healthy, fit, showed no symptoms, and had no family history of the disease.

“So it was kind of out of the blue and fortunately, it was very early stage, and I had options,” says Healy.

His only indication that something was wrong was an elevated PSA level.

Healy had a full checkup each year, including the PSA test, which measures the level of a protein produced by the prostate gland in a man’s blood.

The higher the PSA level, the more likely a man has prostate cancer.

“It’s not an indicator of cancer, it’s an indicator that something’s different and it’s worth checking,” says Healy.

However, the task force says men are being over-treated for the disease, which is why it recommends doing away with the test.

Urologist Ricardo Rendon says that may have been true in the early days of prostate cancer awareness, however, treatment tends to be more conservative now.

“Over the years, we have realized that many of these cancers grow slowly, if at all,” says Rendon. “So we perform a lot of active surveillance for low-risk cancers. So in the past, when all these people were having radiation and surgery, now we’re just treating them with only observation.”

Rendon admits the PSA test is not without flaws, as it can provide both false positives and negatives. Still, he argues it has value.

“PSA is not a perfect tool, but it’s still the best tool we have and, in fact, of all the screening tools, it’s one of the best, if not the best, when we include mammograms and other screening tests,” says Rendon.

Healy believes the simple blood test saved not just one life, but two. After his brush with cancer, his brother decided to get tested as well and he too was diagnosed with the disease.

“He was so far advanced, more than me,” says Healy. “He certainly could have been in a very, very critical situation.”

Healy says he hopes the new recommendations will not discourage men from taking control of their own health.