![]() ![]() Or, their family history is happening in real time, as an uncle, father, brother, or grandfather is diagnosed with prostate cancer. You can read more about that here.)Īnd finally: a lot of men don’t know their family history. (Good news: if you lose weight and/or stop smoking, your risk of dying starts to drop right away. If you are obese, or if you smoke, and you get prostate cancer, you are more likely to die of it. There are also lifestyle factors that put you at higher risk do they mention those? No. For another, what are the personal preferences? Not wanting to die of prostate cancer? For another, why is there a cutoff at age 69? Healthy older men can still be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and can still be cured of it – or, conversely, still die from metastatic prostate cancer – so this, too, is just misguided. If you have a family history of prostate cancer, you need to start getting screened at age 40. For one thing, men need to start getting screened in their 40s. This was a disastrous ruling, and in 2018, the USPSTF walked it back, lamely, saying that prostate cancer screening for men aged 55-69 should be “an individualized decision based on personal preferences when weighing the benefits and harms of screening.” Urologists and medical oncologists protested this from the get-go. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) – speaking of dumpster fires– published guidelines discouraging routine screening for prostate cancer, concluding that the benefits do not outweigh the harms of treatment. They don’t consider that maybe the guidelines were written by people who might have an axe to grind, people who might want to ration care, people who might think that every single man diagnosed with prostate cancer gets unnecessary treatment and suffers terrible side effects, as if there hasn’t been any improvement in prostate cancer screening and treatment since the 1990s, or people who might believe, mistakenly, that prostate cancer is very slow-growing and doesn’t need to be treated at all – or all of the above. ![]() ![]() ![]() And this is because, often, family doctors don’t know all the ins and outs of screening for particular cancers they simply can’t be specialists in everything, so they rely heavily on the government guidelines. They didn’t get screened because their family doctor told them they didn’t need to. If these men had been screened regularly, with a simple PSA blood test even if they didn’t get a physical exam, they might have been diagnosed with cancer that was still confined to the prostate, cancer that’s much easier to treat, cancer that can be cured.īut no. It upsets me greatly, because I have known too many men over the years who have died from metastatic prostate cancer. No, this failure to screen for prostate cancer has been going on for a while. I am also extremely worried about the mental health ramifications of isolation, particularly on the elderly, which I will be addressing in other posts.) (By the way, the coronavirus fallout is massive: neglected routine medical maintenance – mammograms, colonoscopy, dental visits, yearly bloodwork, delayed care. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why: Many men are not getting screened for prostate cancer. The dumpster fire that is 2020 just keeps on burning, and the latest fuel for this crappy fire is a study, published in the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, showing that the incidence of men being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer doubled between 20. ![]()
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