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Despite the ongoing debate over the risks versus benefits of prostate cancer screening, few physicians would disagree that many patients with low-risk disease have been overtreated during the past several decades. For prostate cancer investigators, a major goal has been to develop a biomarker that could help clinicians select relatively low-risk patients whose survival would be improved by immediate definitive treatment. In the absence of such a marker, an alternate strategy has been to provide active surveillance, whereby serial assessments of measures such as prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels and biopsy results are used to determine the need for treatment.
Now, investigators have used microsimulation modeling to predict outcomes for p…