It's just a blood test, but the first to undergo Prostate Specific Antigen testing for early detection of prostate cancer is good to know the pros and cons of the test, and discuss with your doctor

The PSA, or prostate specific antigen, is not a test to be taken lightly: despite being a simple blood test, requires that the patient is adequately informed about the benefits and risks that must be met. All agree on its usefulness to monitor over time the cases already operated for prostate cancer, but more controversial is its use to sift through all the healthy men of a certain age and to detect the possible presence of cancer at an early stage .

In this case the relationship between side effects and benefits is still not entirely clear even to the experts, so that in no country in the world are in place screening programs, such as you do with the Pap test, and international scientific societies, as well as the Italian ones, have opposing views that confuse the public.

In healthy adults without disorders attributable to prostate cancer, in fact, there is a high risk of finding abnormal values ​​of PSA in the absence of the disease, which experts call those false positives. On the other hand, the probability is very high chance to hunt with this cancer screening that the patient would never have discovered, a phenomenon experts call of overdiagnosis.

This is because, in a high percentage of cases, prostate cancer grows so slowly that there are many chances that a man reaches the end of his life without even knowing it, or is developed in such advanced age that has no time to sign him.

Studies to date show that the determination of Prostate Speciic Antigen increases the possibility of detecting prostate cancer at an early stage. But not everyone agrees that, in anticipation of the diagnosis, we can reduce the number of people who will die of the disease. Even the research that seem to confirm this possibility, then conclude that for every person saved is not negligible number of people receiving a diagnosis and treatment does not affect the ominous term, but which adversely affects their quality of life. An elevated Prostate Specific Antigen is forcing to invasive diagnostic tests, such as trans-rectal endoscopic biopsy, which may follow bleeding and infection, and treatments that can be taxed, in a variable percentage of cases, significant complications, such as incontinence or erectile impotence.

Faced with these conflicting results, so each must weigh well, with the help of your doctor, whether to add or not to list the initials of routine Prostate specific Antigen .