Sci-Bytes> Hot Paper in Medicine
Week of November 28, 2010
"Screening and prostate-cancer mortality in a randomized European study," by Fritz H. Schröder and 23 others, New England Journal of Medicine, 360(13): 1320-8, 26 March 2009.
[Authors' affiliations: 15 European institutions]
Abstract: "Background The European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer was initiated in the early 1990s to evaluate the effect of screening with prostate-specific-antigen (PSA) testing on death rates from prostate cancer.
Methods We identified 182,000 men between the ages of 50 and 74 years through registries in seven European countries for inclusion in our study. The men were randomly assigned to a group that was offered PSA screening at an average of once every 4 years or to a control group that did not receive such screening. The predefined core age group for this study included 162,243 men between the ages of 55 and 69 years. The primary outcome was the rate of death from prostate cancer. Mortality follow-up was identical for the two study groups and ended on December 31, 2006.
Results In the screening group, 82% of men accepted at least one offer of screening. During a median follow-up of 9 years, the cumulative incidence of prostate cancer was 8.2% in the screening group and 4.8% in the control group. The rate ratio for death from prostate cancer in the screening group, as compared with the control group, was 0.80 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.65 to 0.98; adjusted P = 0.04). The absolute risk difference was 0.71 death per 1000 men. This means that 1410 men would need to be screened and 48 additional cases of prostate cancer would need to be treated to prevent one death from prostate cancer. The analysis of men who were actually screened during the first round (excluding subjects with noncompliance) provided a rate ratio for death from prostate cancer of 0.73 (95% CI, 0.56 to 0.90).
Conclusions PSA-based screening reduced the rate of death from prostate cancer by 20% but was associated with a high risk of overdiagnosis."
This 2009 report from the New England Journal of Medicine was cited 53 times in current journal articles indexed by Clarivate during July-August 2010. During that two-month period, only one other medicine paper published in the last two years, excluding reviews, collected a higher number of citations. Prior to the most recent two-month tally, citations to the paper have accrued as follows:
May-June 2010: 58 citations
March-April 2010: 49
January-February 2010: 52
November-December 2010: 42
September-October 2010: 43
July-August 2010: 38
May-June 2010: 10
March-April 2010: 2
Total citations to date: 347
SOURCE: Hot Papers Database (Included with a subscription to the print newsletter Science Watch®, available from the Research Services Group of Thomson Reuters. Packaged on a CD that is mailed with each Science Watch issue, the Hot Papers Database contains data on hundreds of highly cited papers published during the last two years. User interface permits searching by author, organization, journal, field, and more. Total citations, as well as citations accrued during successive bimonthly periods, can be assessed and graphed. An updated CD containing the most recent bimonthly data is mailed with every new issue of Science Watch, six times a year. The CD also includes an electronic version of the Science Watch issue in HTML format, for personal desktop access.
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