In a recent Health Affairs article, David Asch and I wrote about how hard it can be to stop screening aggressively for things like breast and prostate cancer even when the evidence suggests we are doing more harm than good. Well, journalist Steven Petrow has a nice piece in the Washington Post looking at the good old testicular exam. Lots of nice insights, so I thought I’d share it:
Late last year, “Today” show anchors Willie Geist and Carson Daly took one for the men’s team when they underwent testicular cancer exams on live TV. Lots of predictable joking ensued, especially from co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, who ad-libbed: “When I heard what you guys were doing, I thought it was nuts!” The “attending” urologist, David Samadi of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, also took to wordplay, asking: “Who’s going to play ball first?” Geist stepped up.
Within minutes both anchors received clean bills of health along with Samadi’s congratulations for getting the exams. Samadi also encouraged the rest of maledom to perform testicular self-exams monthly in the interest of early detection, which he said can save lives — but do they?
Nearly 9,000 cases of testicular cancer in the United States are diagnosed every year — especially among men ages 15 to 34, where it’s the most common cancer — so the “Today” segment seemed like a useful public service announcement.But unfortunately there’s no evidence that self-exams detect testicular cancer at an earlier stage, according to Durado Brooks, director of colon and prostate cancer prevention programs for the American Cancer Society. Even if these exams did, says Kenny Lin, an assistant professor of family medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, early detection has little, if any, bearing on outcomes for those who are diagnosed. Lin calls the “Today” segment “a stunt cloaked as a health message,” and he points out that even the august U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends against testicular cancer screening — a change from the past.
Other routine screening tests have also earned a thumbs down from the medical establishment in recent years, as more clinical evidence has been gathered showing them to be less beneficial than once thought. Among the tests no longer universally recommended: PSA screening for prostate cancer, breast cancer self-exams for women and mammograms for women younger than 50, and Pap smears for cervical cancer for women younger than 21. Not only do these exams have nearly no effect on outcomes, the task force said, they can sometimes do more harm than good.
Regarding testicular screening in particular, it “is unlikely to offer meaningful health benefits, given the very low incidence and high cure rate of even advanced testicular cancer” while “potential harms include false-positive results, anxiety and harms from diagnostic tests or procedures,” according to the task force.
So why do some doctors continue to recommend these screenings — and why do some patients still want them? (To read the rest of this article, please visit The Washington Post.)