Prostate Cancer Treatment Progress: Death Rate Declines 45%

While prostate cancer remains a serious health concern for men over 60, the disease is becoming less threatening. American men with prostate cancer were 45 percent less likely to die from the disease in 2006 than they were in 1999, according to the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The federal agency found that the rate at which American men died from prostate cancer declined from 23.5 deaths to 13 deaths per 100,000 males during the period.

The analysis also shows that following changes:

• Compared with white men, black men were still more than twice as likely to die from prostate cancer in 2006 just as they were in 1999—69 to 50.5 deaths and 29 deaths to 22 deaths per 100,000 males during the period.
• The rate for Hispanics and Asian-American Pacific Islanders declined from 23 to 18 and from 17 to 14 , respectively, per 100,000 males.
• Men age 65 and older were 20 percent less likely to succumb to prostate cancer in 2006 compared with 1999. Their rate plummeted from 205 deaths to 164 deaths per 100,000 males.

While AHRQ didn't give a reason for the decline in deaths, it's likely that early detection was a major contributor. In current clinical practice, men with elevated levels of Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) are considered at risk of having prostate cancer.

PSA is a substance produced by the prostate gland and, when increased amounts are found in the blood, patients are typically referred for diagnostic biopsies to confirm the presence of prostate cancer. A regular PSA test can give doctors a head start on treatment.

Predictor

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal found that a man's PSA level measured at age 60 could predict his lifetime risk of dying of prostate cancer.

Dr. Hans Lilja, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and colleagues studied data from 1,167 Swedish men 60 years of age who provided blood samples in 1981 and were followed up to age 85. Only a minority of men age 60 with PSA levels higher than 2 ng/mL experienced fatal prostate cancer, but those men comprised 90 percent of the prostate cancer deaths.

Men with a PSA level of 2 or higher at age 60 have 17 times and 26 times increased odds of metastasis and death from prostate cancer, respectively, than men with PSA levels of 0.65-0.99, according to the study.

Copyright ConsumerAffairs.com 2010

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