Send your comments and tips to whitecoat@globe.com
  Awards Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Ctr. Boston Medical Center Boston University Brigham and Women's Hospital Broad Institute Cambridge Health Alliance Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Ctr. Children's Hospital Boston Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Grants Harvard University Joslin Diabetes Center Lahey Clinic Mass. General Hospital Mass. Health Law McLean Hospital MIT New England Baptist Hospital Personnel Moves Public Health Research Short White Coat Tufts-New England Medical Center Tufts University UMass Memorial Medical Center University of Massachusetts VA Medical Centers    A Healthy Blog Running A Hospital Nature Network Boston SciBos - Corie Lok's blog Kevin, M.D. Blog, MD Nurse at small Dr. Gwenn Is In Healthy Children blog WBUR's CommonHealth Other Globe Blogs
Elizabeth Cooney is a health reporter for the Worcester Telegram &
Gazette.
Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
Scott Allen Alice Dembner Carey Goldberg Liz Kowalczyk Stephen Smith Colin Nickerson Beth Daley Karen Weintraub, Deputy Health and Science Editor, and Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor. Short White Coat blogger Ishani Ganguli Short White Coat blogger Jennifer Srygley  Week of:
November 11
Week of:
November 4
Week of:
October 28
Week of:
October 21
Week of:
October 14
Week of:
October 7
|
« Electronic records alone don't improve outpatient care, study says | Main | Today's Globe: antismoking ads, nursing program, RNAi deal » Monday, July 9, 2007'Prostatempathy' may guide inappropriate PSA test ordering, study saysMen who are too young or too old for prostate cancer screening tests are still getting them from clinicians whose "prostatempathy" may be guiding their decisions, Harvard researchers suggest in a study of seven New England veterans' hospitals. Health experts agree that men without symptoms who are under 40, older than 75 or expected to have less than 10 years to live do not benefit from the prostate-specific antigen test. They can suffer psychological and financial costs and possibly have procedures that may not help them, according to the article in today's Archives of Internal Medicine. Dr. B. Price Kerfoot and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School and the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System decided to look at who was ordering these tests despite the consensus that they should not be used. They found that people who rarely ordered the PSA tests, urologists and male practitioners all tended to order the tests more often for men who fell into groups considered inappropriate for the screening. "The percentage of inappropriate PSA screening increased significantly with the age of male health care providers," the authors wrote. "It it possible that, as they age, male health care providers increasingly empathize with their older male patients over prostate cancer concerns. Their 'prostatempathy' may then lead to more aggressive screening in these older male patients." Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 04:15 PM
|
