Milwaukee, WI -- (SBWIRE) -- 02/13/2012 -- Since 1986, when a reliable blood test first became available, hundreds of thousands of men have been screened for prostate cancer. The message was simple: find the cancer early, save your life. Now a long-running government study has a different message: finding cancer early will not save your life, in fact it may lead to unnecessary and painful treatments.

The current method of screening for prostate cancer is the PSA blood test, which measures a protein called the prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. Now the United States Preventive Services Task Force concludes that routine screenings are unnecessary. Behind this controversial conclusion lies a recent major study; the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) cancer screening trial, recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers studied prostate cancer screening in 76,000 men, aged from 55 to 74. The participants were randomly assigned to receive annual cancer screening. Six years of screening were performed with the PSA method and an additional four years of screening were done with a digital rectal exam. Those participants who were not assigned to receive annual screenings received standard care and were thus only screened if their doctor recommended it.

In the group of men who received annual screening, 12% more cases of prostate cancer were detected when compared to the group that received standard care. However, when it came to the number of actual deaths caused by prostate cancer, the two groups were comparable. In fact, there were slightly more deaths due to prostate cancer in the screening group than in the standard care group.