Routine testing for prostate cancer has been blamed for causing stress and anxiety among patients who do not understand the screening process and the implications of an abnormal result. But a new study suggests that the widespread use of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test has lowered the risk of suicide among men with this type of cancer.

A team from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston examined a US government database of more than 340,000 men who were diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1979 and 2004, 148 of whom subsequently committed suicide. They found that men told they had cancer before 1993 — when widespread PSA testing started — were around three times as likely to kill themselves in the first three months following diagnosis and around 50% more likely in the first year than the national average. Men diagnosed in the PSA era had no elevated suicide risk, the researchers reported yesterday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The researchers chalk up the reduction in risk to the fact that early screening detects less aggressive tumors that are still treatable, although they can’t rule out the possibility that improved counseling accompanying the PSA tests also helped.

The findings from the US contradict the same team’s previous results from a large population of prostate cancer patients in Sweden. In that study, the risk of suicide among prostate sufferers remained more than double that of the general population throughout the entire study period. “The reason for this discrepancy is unclear,” the authors wrote.

The risk of dying from heart disease among prostate cancer patients was also higher in pre-PSA times. (LA Times)

For more on the controversy surrounding PSA testing, see our December 2009 news feature.