Panel: Don’t Get Prostate Cancer Screenings

A government health panel will recommend on Friday that men should not get PSA blood tests as part of prostate cancer screenings because they do more harm than good. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force says the PSA blood tests should not be part of a routine cancer screening—something that will most likely not come as a surprise to most cancer specialists. No major medical group recommends the PSA blood tests, despite the conventional wisdom that finding cancer early is always a good thing. The test detects for too much PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, in the blood—but sometimes the test will show slow-growing tumors that are too small to ever be deadly, causing men to undergo unnecessary cancer treatment.