Screening with a PSA test has a small impact on prostate cancer deaths but leads to overdiagnosis

Press release issued: 6 April 2024

The largest study to date investigating a single invitation to a PSA blood test to screen for prostate cancer has found it had a small impact on reducing deaths, but also led to overdiagnosis and missed early detection of some aggressive cancers. The CAP trial, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and carried out by researchers from the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge, involved over 400,000 men aged 50-69. Just under half received a single invitation for a PSA test as part of the trial.

After following up for 15 years, there was a small difference in the number of men who died from prostate cancer between the two groups – nearly seven men out of every 1,000 in the group invited for screening had died from prostate cancer, compared to nearly eight men out of every 1,000 in the group who hadn’t been invited for screening.

The results of the trial show that an estimated one in six cancers found by the single PSA screening were over-diagnosed.

Read the full University of Bristol news story

'Prostate-specific antigen screening and 15-year prostate cancer mortality - a secondary analysis of the CAP randomized clinical trial’ by Richard M. Martin et al. in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)