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Veterans Affairs hospitals screen elderly men with limited life expectancies for prostate cancer at surprisingly high rates, even though guidelines recommend against such screening, according to a study led by a physician at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC).
“Some VA hospitals are screening up to four fifths of their very ill, very elderly patients, and some as few as one quarter, but none are targeting screening according to the men’s life expectancy,” said principal investigator Louise C. Walter, MD, a geriatrician at SFVAMC and a professor of medicine at UCSF.
The study of 622,262 men at 104 VA medical centers around the country was published electronically in the Journal of General Internal Medicine on Dec. 17, 2011.
