Is serum PSA measurement a good test for early diagnosis of prostate cancer? Results of a pilot study and cost analysis.

Over the last years--late 1970s to early 1990s--the incidence of prostate carcinoma has nearly doubled, even though many more patients die suffering from prostate cancer than because of it. This finding, together with the slow growth of this tumor and the absence of a controlled trial that would suggest a benefit from screening, makes early diagnosis of this disease quite questionable. On the other hand, it is well known that prostatic carcinoma is curable as long as it is intracapsular, and that there is an ever increasing encouragement to early detection in all diseases. The costs of screening and the difficulty in balancing the benefits of screening against its negative effects, such as psychological impact and overtreatment, must be taken into account as well. In our opinion, one of the advantages of early diagnosis should be that the patients' quality of life improves, because the stage at diagnosis and, as a result, the number of patients suffering from bone metastasis decrease, and unknown benign pathologies can be cured. These observations are not at all negligible. Our study aims to demonstrate that by using PSA as an initial test, the screening costs are reasonable and the disease incidence is just as expected.