Interesting conversation. My concern is that like other things this study will be used by the people who actually matter to the medical community, the insurance companies, to deny coverage for the PSA.

I have had the annual PSA since about 1989. At that time it was relatively new and they were trying to test a wide spectrum of people so to get better data. During the years since then I've had more than one spike of very high PSA. The spikes have been in the double digits and served as a yellow flag that something apparently abnormal was going on. In each case, after appropriate further testing and, most important, intelligent analysis, we decided what the most likely cause was and proceeded. In each case we were correct and PSA levels returned to normal. But, the PSA served its' purpose. It was the alarm bell that focused attention on a problem. In each case the problem wasn't cancer but without attention could have been very serious.

I don't want the herd level political and economic decisions to remove my option for this test.