Prostate Cancer Mortality in the U.S. and U.K.: Effect of PSA Screening

While we await more-definitive data from two major randomized trials of prostate cancer screening — the U.S. Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial and the European Randomized study of Screening for Prostate Cancer — investigators continue to explore other sources that can contribute to the ongoing debate about using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels in screening protocols. To evaluate trends over time, academic investigators from the U.K. and the U.S. evaluated prostate cancer–specific and all cancer–specific mortality data from 1975 or later for the U.K. and the U.S.; annual U.K. and U.S. radical prostatectomy data also were extracted. Since 1990, PSA testing has been much more common in the U.S. than i…