[Yogi]

Talk about descrimination! What this article/study is coming right out with and saying is" !f you're an old guy, don't bother getting tested for cancer. But if you do waste our time and resources doing just that, and if you happen to be diagnosed with cancer, please don't waste our time and resources getting treatment. Just go away somewhere, and die"!

By Genevra Pittman

NEW YORK | Tue Mar 29, 2011 2:22pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Many men in their 80s get regular blood tests for prostate cancer even though there's no evidence the tests will benefit them, according to a new study.

In older men, finding hidden prostate cancer might not be helpful, because the cancer might not shorten their lifespan. But once it's discovered, a very early-stage cancer usually leads to painful and expensive medical encounters.

So with elderly men, screening "makes no sense," Dr. Peter Albertsen, a prostate cancer researcher at University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington who was not involved with the current study, told Reuters Health.

The researchers also found that men in their 70s were almost twice as likely as men in their 50s to have a blood test that looks for signs of prostate cancer - even though younger men have the best chance to benefit from screening.

"Those younger men are the ones the test was designed for," Dr. Scott Eggener, one of the study's authors from the University of Chicago Medical Center, told Reuters Health. But older men "are far more likely to see their doctor regularly," and doctors may be used to ordering the prostate cancer blood tests in these men without really thinking about it, he said.

The findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, come amid a debate in the medical community on whether routine cancer screening can extend lives.

The blood test in question looks for a protein produced by the prostate called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. As the National Institutes of Health explains on its web site, the higher a man's PSA level, the more likely it is that he has prostate cancer. A man can have an elevated PSA level without having cancer, though.

To estimate national rates of PSA screening, Eggener and his colleagues consulted data from two country-wide health surveys that had been conducted in 2000 and 2005. The surveys asked almost 15,000 men whether they had been screened for prostate cancer in the past year.

Twenty-four percent of men in their early 50s said they had been screened. More men reported recent screening as age increased, with about 46 percent of men in their early 70s having been screened. Rates declined again once men passed the age of 74, but about 25 percent of men age 85 and older still said they had been screened in the past year.

Scaling those numbers up to reflect the entire U.S. population, the authors calculated that about 1.5 million men in their 80s and older had a PSA screening test recently.

While catching prostate cancer early can prevent the disease from progressing, men with a positive reading are subjected to biopsies and sometimes treatment, involving uncomfortable procedures that carry risks of complications and side effects.

Especially with older men or those with other chronic diseases, it's possible that the risk is for nothing, and that having undetected cancer wouldn't have cut any time from their lives.

Screening patients who won't really benefit also adds unnecessary costs to the health system. The average cost of a PSA test is estimated to range from $70 to $400 dollars. Medicare will pay for 80 percent of the cost, but some private insurance companies won't cover PSA screening at all.

Dr. Steven Woloshin, who studies the risks and benefits of cancer screening at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, said that even in younger men, there is not much evidence that prostate screening can prevent deaths.

"There's a small chance or maybe no chance of benefit," Woloshin, who also did not participate in the new study, told Reuters Health, "but there's certainly a possibility of harm" in the form of unnecessary tests and treatment.

[andyt]

I agree with this. We don't need to treat everything. Even for younger men, prostrate cancer is often best treated with "benign neglect" because it is slow moving and something else will kill them before the cancer does.

We spend a vast amount of money treating people in their first and last year of life. We should not be spending huge resources trying to keep very young preemies alive who will likely go on to have a vastly diminished quality of life anyway. We should not be hooking up terminal old folks to all sorts of machines to prolong "life" when life consists of lying in a hospital bed, in pain with death the only outcome anyway. I certainly don't want that for myself.

In the US, people with good insurance can push to have all sorts of unnecessary tests and treatments because otherwise they will sue their insurance company. Probably one reason why costs are so much higher there. In Canada we place reasonable limits on treatment, and treating hopeless preemies or old folks should be off limits too. Bring on the death panels.

[bootlegga]

So I guess it's only discrimination when it's aimed at seniors right?

Classic! Ageism at finest, Yogi.

In this thread you rail about old people being discriminated against yet in another thread, you post go out of your way to cricitize and generalize about the younger generation!

[Yogi]

andyt wrote:

I agree with this. We don't need to treat everything. Even for younger men, prostrate cancer is often best treated with "benign neglect" because it is slow moving and something else will kill them before the cancer does.
We spend a vast amount of money treating people in their first and last year of life. We should not be spending huge resources trying to keep very young preemies alive who will likely go on to have a vastly diminished quality of life anyway. We should not be hooking up terminal old folks to all sorts of machines to prolong "life" when life consists of lying in a hospital bed, in pain with death the only outcome anyway. I certainly don't want that for myself.

In the US, people with good insurance can push to have all sorts of unnecessary tests and treatments because otherwise they will sue their insurance company. Probably one reason why costs are so much higher there. In Canada we place reasonable limits on treatment, and treating hopeless preemies or old folks should be off limits too. Bring on the death panels.

And how many times have we heard " If only you had of come in to see me 3 months ago..."

What you seem to be advocating is 'no medical help for those under the age of 1 yr or over the age of 70. Have you told your parents yet!

[andyt]

Yogi wrote:

What you seem to be advocating is 'no medical help for those under the age of 1 yr or over the age of 70. Have you told your parents yet!

Only if you're reading what I wrote with a dunce cap on. I talked about early preemies with little chance of quality of life, and terminal old people. Actually terminal anybody - why prolong life if it consists of lying in a bed hooked up to tubes. Allow them to die in peace and dignity. My mother is still alive, she agrees with me 100%. Signed a living will and all. But the way she's going she might outlive me.

[Yogi]

Preemies deserve every chance we can provide them with. As for 'terminal'. Just how the hell ya gonna know that without going in and getting tested??? Yes, If diagnosis is terminal, then the medical focus should be on pain relief and comfort to the end. BUT...

[andyt]

Yogi wrote:

Preemies deserve every chance we can provide them with.

Really? Some foetus that's 20 weeks old?

[Yogi]

andyt wrote:

Yogi wrote:

Preemies deserve every chance we can provide them with.

Really? Some foetus that's 20 weeks old?

YUP!

[BartSimpson]

andyt wrote:

Yogi wrote:

Preemies deserve every chance we can provide them with.

Really? Some foetus that's 20 weeks old?

Were it my child and the doctor let it die need I state my next action?

Abortion issues aside, once a child is born it has every right to life as you do.

Or else we head down that slippery slope where we first say that preemies don't have a right to live.

Then we say it of the mentally infirm.

Then the Alzheimer's patients (because they're just going to die anyway, right?)

And then the asthmatics. The chronically ill. The depressed.

And then since we're there we start looking at the socially unacceptable.

And one thing leads to another...

Quote:

So ya
Thought ya
Might like to
go to the show
To feel the warm thrill of confusion
That space cadet glow
I've got some bad news for you sunshine
Pink isn't well he stayed back at the hotel
And they sent us along as a surrogate band
And we're going to find out where you fans
Really stand
Are there any queers in the theatre tonight
Get 'em up against the wall
That one looks Jewish
And that one's a coon
Who let all this riff raff into the room
There's one smoking a joint and
Another with spots
If I had my way I'd have all of you shot

[andyt]

As I said, we already deny treatment for a variety of reasons in Canada. In the States you do it by what people can afford. Heroic measures to save a life that mostly likely will be severely impaired (if it survives at all) just don't make sense to me.

[BartSimpson]

andyt wrote:

As I said, we already deny treatment for a variety of reasons in Canada. In the States you do it by what people can afford.

Under Federal Law no one can be denied lifesaving medical treatment. That's a big reason why we get so many Mexicans coming here and that's for the free health care.

andyt wrote:

Heroic measures to save a life that mostly likely will be severely impaired (if it survives at all) just don't make sense to me.

http://www.disabled-world.com/artman/pu ... 0060.shtml

Who of that list would have died under Andy's National Health Plan?

[Proculation]

I'm for it too. Prostate cancer is a slowly developing cancer and treating someone in the 80s won't help him much and worst, he will then urinate everywhere. I prefer 2 or 3 years less to my life than having to wear diapers for the last 10 years of my life.