Impact of United States Preventive Services Task Force recommendations on prostate biopsy characteristics and disease presentation at a tertiary-care medical center.

Background: To evaluate early consequences of 2012 United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations for decreased prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening on prostate biopsy characteristics and prostate cancer presentation.

Materials and methods: A single tertiary-care institution, multisurgeon, prospectively maintained database was queried for patients undergoing prostate biopsy from October 2005 to September 2016. Patient demographics, biopsy characteristics, and extent of disease were reported. Patient cohorts before and after USPSTF recommendations were compared using two-sample t test, Chi-square test, and Wilcoxon rank sum test with significance at P  < 0.05.

Results: A total of 2,000 patients were analyzed, including 1,440 patients before and 560 patients after USPSTF recommendations. Following the recommendations, patients had higher prebiopsy PSA (5.90 vs. 6.70, P  < 0.001). Overall, 817 (40.9%) patients had prostate cancer detected at biopsy with an increase from 37.0% before to 50.8% after ( P  < 0.001). Biopsies detected less low-risk Gleason ≤6 prostate cancer (47.4% vs. 41.1%) and more intermediate-risk Gleason 7 cancer (30.9% vs. 39.7%), with comparable findings of high-risk Gleason ≥8 cancer (21.7% vs. 19.2%), P  = 0.042. In addition, greater percentage of core involvement ( P  < 0.001) was seen. At the time of diagnosis, extraprostatic extension identified by pelvic imaging increased from 12.6% to 18.9%, P  = 0.039, with a trend toward lymph node positivity (1.1% vs. 2.2%, P  = 0.078). Of those with metastatic disease, bony involvement occurred more often (1.7% vs. 3.2%, P  = 0.041).

Conclusions: After 2012 USPSTF guidelines, patients presented with higher PSA with prostate cancer were detected more frequently. More adverse, pathologic prostate cancer features were found on biopsy with the extent of disease implicating locally advanced/metastatic disease. These findings should be considered when counseling patients about prostate cancer screening importance.