@donheff

You're talking a great deal of sense in this thread. Screening is only useful if the benefits outweigh the risks and if it leads to interventions that actually save lives.

Those who are in favour of routine PSA should ask themselves what their view would be if it had not yet been introduced to the general population but had been the subject of an extended clinical trial, with the outcome reported in the study. That outcome would have been something like this:

"PSA testing does detect prostate cancers. However, those whose cancers were detected by the test had outcomes that were very little different from those in the control group, who were not given the tests. In other words, having the test made no difference to their chances of getting cancer and virtually no difference to their chance of dying of it. In addition, the PSA test gave rise to many false positives which led many patients to receive invasive, risky and sometimes very damaging treatment they did not need."

In the light of such a trial, I suggest that very few people would want to introduce routine PSA testing or subject themselves to it. And an extended clinical trial, with pretty much exactly those results, is what you have been conducting in the States for years.