United States sees shift toward active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer

Research published in the journal Cancer indicates a significant shift in the management of prostate cancer in the United States, with a move away from immediate treatment toward active surveillance for low-risk cases.

Data analyzed from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program, the Veterans Affairs (VA) health system, and the Michigan Radiation Oncology Quality Consortium (MROQC) show that the proportion of low-risk prostate cancer diagnoses has declined since 2010. In SEER records, low-risk diagnoses fell from 28.8% to 24.0%, while VA records showed a drop from 32.3% to 21.9%.

More notably, patients diagnosed with low-risk cancer are increasingly opting out of aggressive interventions like radiation or prostatectomy. In the SEER data, the rate of patients receiving neither treatment rose from 33.6% to 83.4% by 2023. Within the VA system, this figure increased from 51.6% to 96.3% by 2024. These trends reflect growing medical concerns regarding the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of slow-growing, localized cancers that may not pose a threat to patient life.