ArticleJournal of medical screening2021
Impact of cancer screening on metastasis: A prostate cancer case study.
Article in Journal of medical screening, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 2 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prostate-Specific Antigen Screening Patterns and Metastatic Prostate Cancer in US Veterans.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Predicting HER2 overexpression in prostate cancer using machine learning: implications for personalized therapy.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
12 authors at 8 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundTrials of cancer screening present results in terms of deaths prevented, but metastasis is also a key endpoint that screening seeks to prevent. We developed a framework for projecting overall (de novo and progressive) metastases prevented in a screening trial using prostate cancer screening as a case study.
methodsMechanistic simulation model in which screening shifts a fraction of cases that would be metastatic at diagnosis to being non-metastatic. This shift increases the incidence of non-overdiagnosed, organ-confined cases. We use estimates of the risk of metastatic progression for these cases to project how many progress to metastasis after diagnosis and tally the projected de novo and progressive metastatic cases with and without screening. We use data on stage shift from the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) and data on the risk of metastatic progression from the Scandinavian Prostate Cancer Group-4 trial. We estimate the relative risk and absolute risk reductions in metastatic disease at diagnosis and compare these with reductions in overall metastases.
resultsAssuming no effect of screening beyond initial stage shift at diagnosis, the model projects a 43% reduction in metastasis at diagnosis but a 22% reduction in the cumulative probability of metastasis over 12 years in favor of screening. These results are consistent with the empirical findings from the ERSPC.
conclusionAny reduction in metastatic disease at diagnosis under screening is likely to be an overly optimistic predictor of the impact of screening on overall metastasis and disease-specific mortality.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.