medwireNews: Regular prostate cancer screening in young African–American men significantly reduces the likelihood of metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis, show study findings reported at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting.
African–American men are more likely to die from prostate cancer than other men in the USA, but research into the benefits of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening has included few African Americans and no younger men from this population, explained Edmund Qiao (University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, USA).
To address this discrepancy, the researchers collated information from 4726 African–American men who were aged 40–55 years at the time of prostate cancer diagnosis in 2004–2017.
The men had undergone an average of 1.9 PSA screening tests in the 5 years before diagnosis; 61.0% of the patients were classified as having a high PSA screening intensity, with an average of 3.0 PSA tests while 10.6% of patients had a low PSA screening intensity, with an average of just 0.5 PSA tests in the time period.
The investigators found that patients with high PSA screening intensity were less likely to have metastatic disease at diagnosis than their low PSA screening intensity counterparts (1.4 vs 4.2%).
A high PSA screening intensity was also associated with a reduced risk for having a Gleason score of 8 or above at diagnosis (10.7 vs 15.3%) and a PSA level above 20 ng/mL (7.2 vs 16.3%).
After adjusting for age, primary care visits, and other sociodemographic factors, men with a high PSA screening intensity were a significant 39% less likely to have metastatic disease at diagnosis than their low PSA screening intensity counterparts.
And this benefit translated into a significant 25% reduction in cumulative prostate cancer-specific mortality over 120 months of follow-up in the high PSA screening intensity group, Qiao reported.
“Prostate cancer screening may improve outcomes for young African–American men,” the presenter concluded, adding that this finding may be “one step in addressing racial disparities in prostate cancer.”
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