US prostate cancer deaths falling
Prostate cancer death rates have fallen almost four times faster in the US than in the UK since the early 1990s, a study has shown.
The reason could be due to different approaches to screening and treatment in the two countries, say researchers.
But the jury is still out on whether blood tests, which are carried out far more routinely in the US, contributed to the better record across the Atlantic.
Prostate cancer screening is carried out using the PSA test, which looks for raised levels of a protein called prostate-specific antigen.
PSA leaks out of the prostate gland into the blood when cancer is present, but can also appear for other reasons.
So far there has been no robust evidence to indicate that carrying out PSA tests on large numbers of men has an impact on prostate cancer mortality.
Yet the test is almost routine in the US. In 2001, 57% of US men aged 50 or older reported having had a PSA test in the past 12 months. By contrast, each year between 1999 and 2002 an estimated 6% of men aged 45 to 84 had the test in the UK.
The new research led by Dr Simon Collin, from the University of Bristol, compared prostate cancer death rates in the UK and US between 1975 and 2004. It found that mortality rates peaked in the early 1990s at almost identical rates in both countries. But after this period it declined in the US with a cumulative decrease of about 4.17% per year - almost four times the 1.17% per- year rate of decline in the UK.
The reduction in US death rates was greatest and most sustained in patients aged 75 and over. Death rates for this age group had plateaued in the UK by the year 2000.
The findings appear in the journal The Lancet Oncology.
