Annual PSA Screening May Reduce Prostate Cancer Specific Mortality Among Black Men

Prostate specific antigen (PSA) screening was associated with a reduced risk of prostate-cancer specific mortality (PCSM) in non-Hispanic Black men and non-Hispanic White men, according to results published as a Brief Report in JAMA Oncology.

A retrospective study looked at data from 45,834 US veterans from the Veterans Health Administration Informatics and Computing Infrastructure for men aged 55 to 69. Men self-identified race and ethnicity and were diagnosed with intermediate-, high-, or very-high prostate cancer from January 2004 to December 2017.

PSA screening rate was associated with a 44% lower risk of PCSM among Black men (subdistribution hazard ratio [sHR]=0.56; 95% CI, 0.41-0.76; P=.001) and a 42% lower risk among White men (sHR=0.58; 95% CI, 0.46-0.75; P=.001).

The researchers found that annual screening compared with “some screening” was associated with a significant reduction in risk of PCSM among Black Men (sHR=0.56; P=.02), but not among White men.

In their discussion of these results, the researchers wrote that “Black men in particular may benefit from more intensive screening protocols.”

Additionally, “a recent model-based analysis also predicted benefit associated with increased screening frequency among Black men, and an investigation using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program Medicare database suggested that frequent PSA screening was associated with reduced racial disparities in the risk of presentation with metastatic disease.”

Reference

Association Between Prostate-Specific Antigen Screening and Prostate Cancer Mortality Among Non-Hispanic Black and Non-Hispanic White US Veterans