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Editor, Evidence-Based Medicine
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In this issue of EBM, we have abstracted 2 new large trials of prostate cancer screening that come to opposite conclusions: one shows a just statistically significant (p = 0.04) reduction in prostate cancer death and the other suggests an increase. Much of the news headlines only seemed to pick up on one article or the other. However, the BBC news story quoted both the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) and the PLCO study and even quoted a number needed to screen: "Overall, for every 1408 men screened, one life was saved." It was pleasing to see this increased sophistication in media reports. However, the reports did nothing to try to resolve the difference in results between the 2 studies.
So how should clinicians proceed when faced with such disagreements? Though the former study is larger, a back-of-the-envelope meta-analysis would suggest the combination will show no
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