He has difficulty urinating after the operation. Should he undergo prostate cancer surgery?

Should the general population undergo prostate cancer screening?

However, for the average person, this routine prostate cancer screening is not necessary. You may wonder: Isn’t it better to diagnose cancer earlier and treat it earlier? Why is screening unnecessary? This is mainly due to the following three factors:

The first is that prostate cancer develops relatively slowly and in many cases does not cause significant health effects on patients or even has no symptoms.

The second factor is that modern medical tests may produce false positive and false negative results. For example, when conducting a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test , if the test value is within the normal range, there is a 25% chance of having prostate cancer, and if the value is higher than the normal range, the chance of having prostate cancer is more than 50%. In other words, a considerable number of people are false positives, and there are also people whose test results are negative, but in fact they have prostate cancer, that is, false negatives. Therefore, if you rely on PSA for diagnosis, there may be diagnostic errors.

Biopsy also has the problem of false positives and false negatives, because during the test, it is not necessarily possible to ensure that the exact location of the cancer is detected.

The third factor is that active treatment is not necessarily the best option. There are many treatments for prostate cancer, including medication, surgery, radiotherapy, etc. However, these treatments can have side effects , including urinary incontinence, sexual dysfunction, intestinal dysfunction, etc.

I have a friend who is in his eighties and was in good health. However, after undergoing prostate surgery, he has difficulty urinating and needs to catheterize himself every time. Therefore, we should be very cautious about the screening, diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer.

Why does the US Secretary of Defense need to be tested?

Currently, prostate cancer screening mainly depends on personal factors and choices. Why did US Secretary of Defense Austin choose to undergo routine screening? It may be due to the following considerations.