Doctors should stop making so many useless tests on elderly men when they check for prostate cancer. These tests bring the men to unnecessary anxiety and sometimes to useless surgery and complications. A federal task force is investigating whether the screening is worth for elderly men.

Men age 75 and older are more at risk to be harmed by the routine check for prostate cancer. The federal task force doesn’t know yet if the PSA tests are the ones who harm the elderly men.

Nowadays doctors ask for unnecessary tests, give unnecessary drugs and overuse procedures which cost too much and expose the patients to unneeded risks and treatment. William J. Catalona, professor of urology at Northwestern University stated that "It's a disservice to patients. A lot of men die from prostate cancer, and there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence that screening saves lives."

The PSA test measures a protein in the blood which is produced by prostate tissue. This test has increased the number of patients diagnosed with prostate cancer. More than 218,000 men in U.S. are diagnosed with this type of cancer. 28,000 of them die, making it the second cancer which kills men.

Still, the prostate cancer process develops very slowly, but such unnecessary tests make it develop faster than it should. It’s nuisance because these PSA tests aren’t precisely enough to diagnose the cancer and still, they led to useless surgical biopsies which could led to other complications.