USA's largest ever prostate cancer screening program shows high compliance and consiste...( Just under five per cent of the men ...),Health

Just under five per cent of the men who took part in the prostate cancer element of the USA's largest ever cancer screening trial were diagnosed with the disease and the majority of those were picked up by screening programmes, according to research published in the December issue of the urology journal BJU International.

A total of 154,934 men and women aged from 55 to 74 took part in the multi-centre Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial and 38,349 men were selected at random to receive a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test and a digital rectal examination (DRE).

"The aim of the study is to determine the impact of annual PSA and DRE screening on prostate cancer mortality by comparing the men who were screened with men undergoing standard medical care without screening" explains Professor Gerald Andriole, Chief of the Division of Urology at Washington University School of Medicine, USA.

"This paper reports the findings from the first three of the five annual follow-up screening rounds. It looks at whether the men continued to take part in the screening programme and examines the characteristics of the cancers that were discovered."

Ten screening centres took part in the research, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Key test findings included:

• The majority of the men included in the study complied with the PSA and DRE tests - 89% complied with both tests at baseline and this figure was 85% by year three.

• Approximately one in seven men received either a positive PSA or DRE test at the baseline, one, two and three year screenings (14%, 13.5%, 14.4% and 15.1% respectively).

• An average of 8% of the men had a PSA positive result of more than 4ng/mL over the four tests (7.9%, 7.7%, 8.2% and 8.8% respectively).

• Just over 7% of the men had a positive DRE result when the four tests were averaged out (7.2%, 6.8%, 7.3% and
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