Screening for prostate cancer (PCa) remains one of the most controversial issues in urological practice. Although robust data from the European Randomised study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) suggest a disease specific survival benefit in favor of prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based PCa screening, the coinciding unfavorable harm-benefit precludes that PCa screening can be adopted as a public health policy. The diagnostic pathway needs to be optimized to reduce unnecessary testing and to avoid diagnosing those cancers that will never harm a patient if not detected through screening. Some men may thus benefit from PCa screening, but with the currently used diagnostics (i.e. the PSA test and systematic TRUS (transrectal ultrasound )-guided prostate biopsy) many more men are harmed by unnecessary testing and the cascade of diagnostic and treatment related events that follow.
Further refinements to screening strategies, focusing on detecting only those PCa that are potentially life threatening (clinically significant) are needed to become acceptable to the general population and health care providers. The investigators propose such a refinement within this protocol, with upfront individual risk prediction and in addition a MRI-driven diagnostic pathway in only those men that are considered to be at intermediate/high-risk of having a potentially life threatening PCa (in general defined as Gleason sum Score (GS) =7).
