Pain Relievers May Make Prostate Cancer Screening Tricky

The popular class of pain relievers – aspirin and ibuprofen – and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs when taken regularly lower a man’s PSA (Prostate specific antigen) level – a protein in the man’s blood used to screen for prostate cancerdefinedefine, according to a research conducted in U.S.

The study featuring in the September 8, online issue of the Journal Cancerdefine analyzed medical records of 1,319 U.S. men aged 40 and above who had reportedly participated in the 2001-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a health census conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The team headed by Eric A. Singer, a urology resident at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, New York, monitored the participant’s use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) such as aspirin and ibuprofen, as well as the painkiller acetaminophen, besides their PSA levels.

PSA is a protein produced by cells in the prostate gland. Elevated levels of PSA in the blood help physicians gauge a man's risk of prostate cancerdefine or other prostate disorders. Moreover, rising levels of PSA over time are associated with both localized and metastatic prostate cancer.

Blood screenings reports revealed that participants who took NSAIDs regularly had PSA levels about 10 percent lower than men who did not take the NSAIDs, researchers found.

Though convincingly a lower PSA level indicates a lower risk of prostate cancer, researchers are worried if these drugs are masking a patient's risk of getting prostate cancer by lowering his PSA levels, making it harder to detect them using common screening blood test. There may be chances that with his lower PSA levels his risk for getting prostate cancer remains unchanged, they averred.

"We showed that men who regularly took certain medications like aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDS, had a lower serum PSA level," Singer noted. "But there's not enough data to say that men who took the medications were less likely to get prostate cancer. This was a limited study, and we do not know how many of those men actually got prostate cancer."

"Given the widespread consumption of NSAIDs and the regular use of PSA for the assessment of prostate cancer risk, the potential implications of our findings may be substantial and warrant further investigation," Singer added.