Prostate-Specific Antigen Screening in the United States vs in the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer–Rotterdam

Dissemination of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing in the United States coincided with an increasing incidence of prostate cancer, a shift to earlier stage disease at diagnosis, and decreasing prostate cancer mortality. We compared PSA screening performance with respect to prostate cancer detection in the US population vs in the Rotterdam section of the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC–Rotterdam). We developed a simulation model for prostate cancer and PSA screening for ERSPC–Rotterdam. This model was then adapted to the US population by replacing demography parameters with US-specific ones and the screening protocol with the frequency of PSA tests in the US population. We assumed that the natural progression of prostate cancer and the sensitivity of a PSA test followed by a biopsy were the same in the United States as in ERSPC–Rotterdam. The predicted prostate cancer incidence peak in the United States was then substantially higher than the observed prostate cancer incidence peak (13.3 vs 8.1 cases per 1000 man-years). However, the actual observed incidence was reproduced by assuming a substantially lower PSA test sensitivity in the United States than in ERSPC–Rotterdam. For example, for nonpalpable local- or regional-stage cancers (ie, stage T1M0), the estimates of PSA test sensitivity were 0.26 in the United States vs 0.94 in ERSPC–Rotterdam. We conclude that the efficacy of PSA screening in detecting prostate cancer was lower in the United States than in ERSPC–Rotterdam.