Early detection and patient risk stratification in prostate cancer

Abstract

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a significant health problem both for individuals, doctors, and public health systems. The received wisdom for the management of cancer problems in general has been that the earlier that a cancer diagnosis is made, the better the outcome for the patient. While it is true that the time to cancer death may often be increased, there has also been much debate about whether the increases in life expectancy after diagnosis of a cancer problem by screening simply represent a lead-time bias where life expectancy after diagnosis is increased by moving the time of diagnosis back to an earlier time point rather than a genuine increase in length of life.