Early Warnings

摘要

Early detection of cancer is broadly seen as key to successful treatment, but many screening programmes are coming under fire for being relatively ineffectual. On 18 March, for example, The New England Journal of Medicine published online two studies of screening programmes for prostate cancer, which look for the biomarker prostate-specific antigen (PSA). One found that the screening programme had no effect on mortality rates for prostate cancer (G. L. Andriole etal. N. Engl. J. Med. 360,1310-1319; 2009), the other found that screening reduced the rate of death from prostate cancer by 20% but was associated with a high risk of overdiagnosis (R H. Schroder et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 360,1320-1328; 2009). Both found that a large number of men received unnecessary medical treatment as a result of the screening programmes.