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Prostate cancer

Personalized risk — stratified screening or abandoning it altogether?

Prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based screening approaches are associated with reduced prostate-cancer mortality, but can lead to overdiagnosis, unnecessary biopsies and overtreatment. Two solutions for this problem exist: to abandon PSA-based screening completely, or to improve the accuracy of PSA-based screening methods to solve the benefit-to-harm equation. Herein we explore these solutions by examining three recent publications.

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Acknowledgements

The work of S.V.C. is supported by a postdoctoral research grant from AFA Insurance and, in part, by a Cancer Center Support Grant from the National Cancer Institute made to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (P30 CA008748). We sincerely thank Assistant Editor J.T. at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for her kind assistance with editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sigrid V. Carlsson or Michael W. Kattan.

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Carlsson, S., Kattan, M. Personalized risk — stratified screening or abandoning it altogether?. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 13, 140–142 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2016.11

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