Better Prostate Cancer Screening for Younger African American Men May Improve Outcomes

Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening and early prostate cancer detection may improve outcomes in younger African American men, according to findings presented at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

The guidelines for age to start screenings vary by organization. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends selectively offering screening for individual patients based on professional judgment or patient preferences at age 55, while the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) encourages providers to begin the discussion with patients aged 40 and above for BRCA2 mutation carriers.

“We saw that there was just this big discordance between one, age at screening, and two, how frequently to screen,” said Edmund Qiao, fourth-year medical student at the University of California San Diego and lead study author, in an interview with CURE®. “And so we want to provide some more data in terms of allowing clinicians to better guide their discussions with patients, especially young African American men, when starting the discussion about PSA screening initiation.”

Transcription:

We kind of realized that there was a big discordance in terms of PSA screening recommendations for young African American men. So there's a lot of medical societies out there, including the USPSTF, the (American Urological Association) and the NCCN, who put forward these guidelines for clinicians in terms of like when to start screening patients. And so we saw that there was just this big discordance between one, age at screening, and two, how frequently to screen. And so we want to provide some more data in terms of allowing clinicians to better guide their discussions with patients, especially young African American men, when starting the discussion about PSA screening initiation.

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