New prostate cancer screening guidelines; what you need to know

We're being joined with our next guest here on Fox 6 Now. I want to go ahead and bring in Dr. Lange with UW Health because actually recently there have been some new guidelines that have come out as far as when people should go and get their prostate cancer screenings. Tell me a little bit more about these new guidelines. It sounds like maybe going in younger and even more frequently. Absolutely. We're actually going back to the way the guidelines were set up over 15 years ago, where we knew that men were at a high risk of prostate cancer. It's the most common cancer diagnosis in men. It's also the second leading cause of cancer death in men as well. And we're going back to what the guidelines used to be, which was doing screening every one to two years, starting at the age of 50, going through 69. Since those guidelines were changed after some older clinical trials, it raised some important questions around were men being over-tested or or over-diagnosed. We found that, unfortunately, the incidence of men presenting with metastatic prostate cancer has been rising about 1% to 3% every year since 2015, which means thousands and thousands of men have been diagnosed with metastatic incurable prostate cancer since that time. So these guideline changes are really going back to something that we knew was more effective, and it's coupled with some other really important advances in the field of better ways and safer ways to diagnose prostate cancer compared to what we were doing 25 years ago when this original clinical trial was conducted. Again, you know, all the stats that you're giving out there going the opposite direction than you would want to see. Obviously, you want to see diagnoses going down and less kind of cases here. So hopefully these new guidelines can help counteract that. I guess how important is early detection when it comes to prostate cancer? Obviously, the statistic there that it's the number two cause of death in men is heartbreaking to hear. But I imagine if you catch it earlier, you have a better chance of beating it. Yeah, we have an almost, we have a 99% cure rate when we catch prostate cancer when it's localized. So that's where identifying it earlier. And it's even more important with prostate cancer because the majority of men won't have any symptoms at all of the disease developing. So that's why it's so important to get screened. It's just a simple blood test that can be conducted in your doctor's office. And I will say, especially for men who are at higher risk If you have a family history. Or if you're a black man, we recommend screening at the age of 45, not just 50, because again, of that higher risk of developing this disease. I was reading about those who are at higher risk. Do you guys know why it is more prevalent in black men? It's a great question. You know, there's so much that we don't understand about the disease right now. We know there are some genetic mutations that can happen, things that can be inherited. You know, we've heard about the BRCA mutations associated with breast cancer. What we found is that can actually be found in about 10 to 15 percent of men with advanced prostate cancer as well. So there's still a lot of research left to be conducted to better understand that. But if there's a family history or if you don't know your family history of cancer risk, that's a really Really important sign that you need to get screened. And I imagine too, I feel like sometimes there's that, well, I'm tough, complex when it comes to men. They don't need to go see the doctor. They'll work through this on their own. So how important is it just to have these kinds of conversations with your friends, with your family members of, hey, it's about that time. Why don't you go in and get your screening done? For the patients that I take care of, when we talk about their own diagnosis, most of those patients will also say to me, Josh, you know, I have one, two, three, or more friends who also have prostate cancer. So having those conversations helps everyone to understand there's a risk, but also that there's treatments out there. But unfortunately, the longer that men wait to get tested, the treatments are more significant, more intense, including things like hormone therapies that can have lifelong side effects. So the earlier men are screened and diagnosed and treated if appropriate, then the chances of them needing any other therapy in the future is almost zero. Yeah, that's amazing. What does this screening look like? I feel like sometimes people are just intimidated with the unknown and that's what keeps them from going. Absolutely. And this is where things have completely changed compared to what we were doing even 10 years ago, where we men come in, they get a blood test and check the PSA. If the PSA is rising over one, two or three visits, that's a good time to be seen by a urologist. At which time we do a scan, we don't just go straight into biopsies anymore. We have new PET scans and new MRI scans that are much more effective at finding cancer and help telling us where we should do that biopsy from. And then those guided biopsies are more accurate and it decreases some of those potential side effects that we found in some of those clinical trials that were done 20, 25 years ago. So it's safer now than it used to be. And does it require other procedures in the office? Again, it's just a simple blood test. And I will say it's even more important in the state of Wisconsin. These are national guidelines, but the state of Wisconsin is 41st in the country for prostate cancer survival. So we are absolutely, our patients, our communities are at a higher risk of developing the disease. Which means it's even more important to get screened. Yeah. And I think, you know, again, the awareness of these statistics is so important here. And again, I actually think it's encouraging to hear the stat you mentioned about how key early detection is and that it has such a high curability when you can catch it early and it hasn't spread anywhere yet. So hopefully this conversation can be encouraging to everyone that's watching. Is there anything else you wanted to mention about these? I was going to say new guidelines, but to your point, we're bringing back the old guidelines actually. No, exactly. I think this is where we have had so many cutting edge advances in just the last five years alone. It really is completely different. So every person, every patient deserves the most cutting edge diagnostics, the most cutting edge therapies. So make sure that you get in to see your doctor and, you know, when in doubt, get a second opinion if needed. Yeah, absolutely. Again, Dr. Joshua Lang here from UW Health joining us on Fox 6 Now. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. And again, I think it's a very important topic Frankly, you know, we're about to have those family gatherings as we talk about Thanksgiving, and it can just be a quick one or two sentences of, hey, when's the last time you got screened? You might be due again. Let's make sure that we're staying on top of all those dates and deadlines.