Over the past decade, millions of men without symptoms of prostate cancer have voluntarily undergone a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test in the UK to find out if they might have prostate cancer.

While research has shown that PSA screening in men aged 50-69 years can reduce cancer deaths, many countries hesitate to recommend or implement formal prostate cancer screening programmes that would offer PSA testing systematically and fairly to all men. The hesitation stems from concern about overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

But our latest research shows that prostate cancer overdiagnosis from PSA screening is mainly a risk for men over the age of 70.

Prostate cancer overdiagnosis occurs when a person is diagnosed with prostate cancer through PSA testing – even though that cancer would not otherwise have been diagnosed within the patient’s lifetime. So had the person not been tested, they might never have known they had prostate cancer.

Overdiagnosis from PSA testing occurs for two main reasons.

The first reason is because PSA tests might identify a cancer that is so slow growing it would never cause problems – even if the man lives to be 100 years old.

The second reason is because a PSA test is able to find prostate cancer a decade or more before it........

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