Maine Coalition to Fight Prostate Cancer

This year, 2025, the expectation is that 313,780 thousand men in the United states will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and approximately 35,770 will die because of it. (Only lung cancer causes more deaths in men, and it is the most common cancer of all diagnoses. )

In 2012, the United States Preventive Service Task Force issued a report that we knew was disastrous and would lead to the increase of PCa not being diagnosed until it had begun to spread. Unfortunately, we were correct. Ably led by then Chair Terry Kungel, the Maine Coalition to Fight Prostate Cancer did everything in its power to have the Task Force recommendations changed but, unfortunately, we only had limited success and, based on the report, many doctors in the United States stopped routinely offering the PSA blood test and men were put in a position of having to request this simple, early warning, inexpensive blood test.

Now, 13 years later, they have been forced to notice that their unfortunate recommendation has led to men suffering and dying because their prostate cancer was not caught in time. The USPSTF had so feared the very real risk of overtreatment of PCa that they left the decision to request the test entirely to men who often did not have good enough information about when to request it, and most physicians were no longer routinely offering it.

In 2018 the task force stated that men age 55 to 69 should make a decision as to whether or not they should be be tested and said that no test should take place after age 70. Of course, many men are quite healthy at age 70 and can expect to live many years longer, but if the test is not offered, they could be doomed to pain, difficult treatments and a shortened life because of prostate cancer. A case in point is former president Joe Biden whose physician stopped offering the PSA when Biden was 70 and now, in his early 80’s, Biden has been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer and is confronted by many difficult treatments.

Prostate cancer diagnoses had been dropping, but by 2014, they started climbing by 3% a year “with diagnoses of advanced-stage disease increasing by 4.6 percent to 4.8 percent each year from 2017 to 2021, while diagnoses of localized disease dropped.”*

“Rates of distant-stage disease increased nearly 3 percent a year in men younger than 55, and increased by 6 percent a year for men over 55. Distant-stage disease has a lower five-year survival rate than cancers diagnosed at an earlier stage.”*

The USPSTF decided finally to update their recommendations and began the process, but Robert F Kennedy Jr. canceled their meeting. So, presumably, even in the face of the new realities, the old advice to men and their physicians remains in force. The American Cancer Society and others like the Maine Coalition have chosen to ignore the old task force guidelines and suggest that men start baseline at age 50 but even earlier, age 40 for black men or any man whose family has a history of prostate cancer. (See our guideline… link here) We are increasingly aware of men even younger than age 45 who have been diagnosed with PCA.

We surely believe that we all abhor unnecessary treatment, and our solution is to better educate all men and urge them to begin testing when it is an appropriate age for them, and to ask the doctor to do the PSA test and to insist on it if necessary.

A terrific article appeared about this on Oct 20, 2025, in the New York Times entitled: REDUCED SCREENING MAY HAVE LED TO RISE IN PROSTATE CANCER written by Roni Caryn Rabin . We will try to quote some of the article. Where you see quotation marks followed by an asterisk, it is a direct quote from the article.

MCFPC is continually available to men and their families. We will continue to keep up with the many changes and provide the latest information. If we are not always successful please do call (toll-free) 1-855-552-7200 x 801 if you have any valuable information to share or questions about information, dates, times, and locations.

~ Nelson Leavitt, Director and Founding & Past President