The New England Journal of Medicine
e-mail icon  FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |    Advanced Search
Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe
 
Correspondence
PreviousPrevious
Volume 349:1672-1673 October 23, 2003 Number 17
NextNext

Verification Bias in Screening for Prostate Cancer

Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

 Sign up for free e-toc
 

This Article
-Full Text
- PDF
-PDA Full Text
-Purchase this article

Tools and Services
-Add to Personal Archive
-Add to Citation Manager
-Notify a Friend
-E-mail When Cited
-E-mail When Letters Appear

More Information
-Related Article
by Punglia, R. S.
-PubMed Citation
To the Editor: Punglia and colleagues (July 24 issue)1 assert that prostate biopsy should be the gold standard for evaluating the sensitivity and specificity of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. This suggestion is not appropriate; clinically significant prostate cancer should be the gold standard. The more biopsies performed, the more incidental, clinically irrelevant cancers, probably unrelated causally to slight PSA elevations, would be detected, leading to unnecessary surgeries with subsequent long-term morbidity or early death. Until we are better able to determine which cancers will truly affect men's lives, we should not lower the PSA threshold for recommending biopsy.


Steven . . . [Full Text of this Article]



HOME  |  SUBSCRIBE  |  SEARCH  |  CURRENT ISSUE  |  PAST ISSUES  |  COLLECTIONS  |  PRIVACY  |  HELP  |  beta.nejm.org

Comments and questions? Please contact us.

The New England Journal of Medicine is owned, published, and copyrighted © 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.