Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
In 47 older men with an enlarged prostate causing urinary problems, doctors removed the excess tissue through the urethra; no one died, and no one needed open surgery.
Descriptive
If radiation therapy brings the PSA level back to undetectable after cancer comes back, the patient is much more likely to live longer—even if the PSA was already high when treatment started.
Correlational
After prostate cancer comes back, how high the PSA is when you start radiation therapy matters more for your survival than how aggressive the cancer looked when it was first diagnosed.
If PSA starts going up—even if it’s still super low (20–50 ng/L)—it’s a strong warning sign that the cancer is coming back and the person is much more likely to die from it than if PSA stays flat.
New, super-sensitive blood tests can spot tiny amounts of PSA that older tests miss, letting doctors find cancer coming back much sooner—sometimes years before it would have been noticed before.
Men whose prostate cancer comes back after surgery and get radiation therapy when their PSA is still very low (under 50 ng/L) live longer and are less likely to get cancer spread than those who wait until their PSA is much higher.
After prostate surgery, men whose PSA levels drop to almost nothing (below 10 ng/L) are much less likely to have the cancer come back or die from it than those whose PSA stays higher.
We need better ways to find the dangerous prostate cancers early, avoid treating harmless ones, and figure out who really needs testing based on their personal risk.
Because we now have better scans and can watch slow-growing cancers instead of treating them right away, PSA testing might be more helpful than harmful—but we still don’t have enough proof to start a national screening program.
Doctors don’t think the finger exam (DRE) is needed if the PSA test is high, and it’s not very useful at all if the PSA is normal—even for men at higher risk.
A new type of scan (mpMRI) before biopsy helps avoid unnecessary procedures and finds more dangerous cancers, but we still don’t know if it saves lives in the long run.
Doctors don’t agree on what PSA level should trigger further testing, and the usual cutoff may not work well for Black men or men with a family history of prostate cancer.
Doctors should bring up PSA testing early with men who are more likely to get prostate cancer—like Black men or those with a family history—instead of waiting for the patient to ask.
In Africa, many cancer-risk genes are old and have been around for a long time; outside Africa, many of those genes changed into a safer version, which is why non-African populations have lower risk.
Just a few gene variants are responsible for most of the higher prostate cancer risk in men of African descent—removing these few variants makes the risk gap between populations disappear.
Quantitative
When early humans left Africa, they took only a small group of genes with them—this accidentally left behind many prostate cancer risk genes, making non-African populations less genetically prone to the disease.
Mechanistic
Some genes that raise prostate cancer risk became common in certain populations not because they helped with cancer, but because they were stuck next to genes that helped people adapt to sunlight—like lighter skin in Europe.
Men whose ancestors came from West Africa are more likely to have genetic traits that raise their chance of getting prostate cancer than men from East Asia, because of ancient human migrations and natural selection.
In places where fewer early cancers are found, death rates are lower — which doesn’t make sense unless many cancers are never counted at all.
Prostate cancer is the #1 cancer diagnosis and killer for Black men in the U.S. and Caribbean — more than any other cancer.
Even though fewer African men are diagnosed with prostate cancer, a much higher percentage of them die from it — meaning many cases are never caught in time.
We don’t yet know if screening men with BRCA mutations for prostate cancer actually saves lives or improves how they feel long-term.
Countries that spend more on healthcare and have more doctors tend to find more small, early prostate cancers — probably because they do more testing.
Standard PSA tests or MRI scans aren’t good enough on their own to find dangerous prostate cancers in men with BRCA mutations—they need better ways to tell who’s really at risk.