Maine Coalition to Fight Prostate Cancer

The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has recently released its recommendation that healthy men should no longer be offered a prostate-specific-antigen (PSA) blood test to screen for prostate cancer. Reasons put forth by the USPSTF for its recommendation are that the PSA test does not save lives, the test cannot tell the difference between cancers that are non-aggressive and those that are aggressive, and that patients are “over treated” which leads to serious side effects, including death.

The new recommendation has been controversial with the National Alliance of State Prostate Cancer Coalitions and the California Prostate Cancer Coalition taking a stand against the recommendations.

On November 2, the Board of Directors of the Maine Coalitioin to Fight Prostate Cancer took a position in opposition to the USPSTF recommendations. Read more about the Board's decision.

Here are some comments and resources on this topic:

My view on the USPSTF recommendations - opinion by Mona Ervin -

NASPCC Position Paper on the USPSTF recommendations -

Speaking Points on the USPSTF controversy from NASPCC -

Recommended Action Items for State Coalitions to consider from NASPCC -

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Mona's View on USPTSC		276 Kb
NASPCC Position Statement on USPSTF		266 Kb
NASPCC State Action Items		336 Kb
NASPCC Speaking Points about USPSTF		328 Kb