Causes of Death in Men with Prostate Cancer

Since the advent of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing, the incidence of prostate cancer has risen sharply, and the consensus has been that many patients with low-risk disease are being overtreated. Yet during the PSA era, disease-specific mortality has remained relatively stable, though data regarding outcomes for prostate cancer patients are lacking.

Now, to assess the causes of death among a modern cohort of men with prostate cancer, investigators used data from population-based databases from the U.S. and Sweden, two countries with some of the highest incidence rates of the disease. They analyzed outcomes of 490,000 men in the U.S Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER) database who were diagnosed with prostate ca…