Grading the New US Preventive Services Task Force Prostate Cancer Screening Recommendation

Volk and Wolf comment on US Preventive Services Task Force's (USPSTF) intention to change its 2008 recommendation from a grade I statement (the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of the benefits and harms of the service) to a grade D recommendation. The USPSTF deserves credit for sharpening the focus on the risks and harms of prostate cancer screening. But by recommending against prostate cancer screening altogether, the task force discounts the evidence supporting the effectiveness of screening and disregards the great value that many men place on averting a cancer death. Given the discrepant screening recommendations that now exist, practicing physicians have a choice: they call either abandon prostate cancer screening altogether or redouble their efforts to communicate the salient issues to age-appropriate healthy men, allowing them to incorporate their own values into a screening decision they can live with.