Informed Prostate Cancer Patient Support

When Good Intentions Turn Deadly: The PSA Screening Debacle That Cost Thousands of Lives TL;DR In 2012, a federal health panel recommended against routine PSA screening for prostate cancer, claiming treatment side effects outweighed early detection benefits. The result: screening rates plummeted, advanced cancer diagnoses surged 72%, and mortality improvements stalled—potentially costing thousands of lives. The policy was partially reversed in 2018 after mounting evidence of harm, but the damage was done. The controversy exposes a fundamental flaw: treating death and treatment side effects as equivalent harms, while ignoring emerging technologies that could have solved overtreatment concerns without abandoning screening. BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's (USPSTF) 2012 recommendation against routine PSA screening triggered a public health disaster: advanced-stage prostate cancer diagnoses surged, previously declining mortality rates stalled, ...

Validation of the Prostatype® P-score for predicting prostate cancer specific mortality in a multiethnic U.S. veterans cohort | Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) A new validation study published in Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases demonstrates that the Prostatype P-score test—which can be performed locally rather than sent to reference laboratories—accurately predicted prostate cancer death in a predominantly African American cohort of U.S. veterans. The test achieved high accuracy (c-index of 0.87) and performed particularly well in intermediate-risk patients, the group that most needs better risk stratification tools. Unlike competing tests, this one can be run in-house at hospitals or certified facilities, potentially reducing wait times and costs while providing critical information to help match treatment intensity to disease aggressiveness. A Critical Gap in Cancer Care One of the most challenging aspects of prostate cancer diagnosis i...

Enzalutamide in metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer: results from the international, multicentre, real-world ARON-3 study | Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases Real-World Evidence Confirms Enzalutamide's Strong Performance in Newly Diagnosed Metastatic Prostate Cancer IPCSG Newsletter Article January 2026 BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) The largest international real-world study of enzalutamide (Xtandi) in metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer confirms the drug's excellent survival outcomes and favorable safety profile outside of clinical trials. The ARON-3 study of 424 patients across 9 countries found that achieving ultra-low PSA levels (≤0.2 ng/mL) within months of starting treatment strongly predicts long-term survival. Even elderly patients over 70 and those with poorer performance status—groups typically excluded from clinical trials—experienced good outcomes with manageable side effects. These findings validate enzalutamide as a strong first-line trea...