Prostate Screening and the Public’s Health

For the first time in several years, I am writing about prostate cancer screening. I had hoped that this was sufficiently covered in 2009, with PSA Screening: What is the value? (March 21) and the excellent guest piece by Robert Ferrer, PSA Screening: “One of Medicine's Great Success Stories"? (October 27), and finally a bit of celebration in 2011 with PSA redux: The USPSTF finally recommends NOT getting it! (October 14). However, like the proverbial bad penny (or to use a more au courant analogy, zombie), this issue continues to return from the dead. The most recent effort is “Bring Back Prostate Screening”, a NY Times op-ed piece by Deepak A. Kapoor on July 6, 2015.

What Dr. Kapoor is suggesting is obvious from the title, but the question is “is there some new information, some new research, that now makes such screening more reasonable or appropriate?" The answer, unfortunately (because it makes more work for the zombie hunters) is “no”. Dr. Kapoor suggests that there is. He notes research is this field is “... now paying off.” He says that the decision to recommend against prostate screening by the US Preventive Services Task Force “…didn’t take into account adaptations that urologists have made to help better identify patients likely to develop deadly prostate cancers.” He cites the increased sensitivity of PSA screening, the individualization of it to the risks of different men, and the use of PSA trajectory (its rate of increase, or not), as well as new methods of assessing cancer like MRI. However, his assertion is incorrect; all of this information was available to the USPSTF when it made its recommendations, and was taken into account. It is not new.

“At the time,” Dr. Kapoor notes, “I and many other urologists warned of public health repercussions. Our fears have materialized. Since 2010, fewer biopsies have been performed and fewer prostate cancers found. But studies show an increase in the risk that a cancer, when found, will be more aggressive.” This sounds scary, but it is to be expected; when you stop screening everyone you won’t find the cancers early. A big part of recommending against PSA screening was that so many of the cancers it identified were indolent and not going anywhere; the aggressive cancers will be the ones that eventually show up. Indeed, he actually acknowledges that “No increase in cancer mortality has been observed,” but continues to raise the alarm with “…that may be a matter of time; aggressive cancers are less treatable.” So maybe we should be scared.

Well, in fact all prostate cancer is treatable. All cancer is; in fact all conditions are. The question is how effective is the treatment? Does it cure? Does it prolong life? Does it improve the quality of remaining life? This is the area that Dr. Kapoor and his colleagues do not address, because, for prostate cancer, the answer is basically no. If you have the more common kind of prostate cancer, it is slow-growing (indolent) and may even disappear itself; you will die with it, rather than from it. If you have the less-common aggressive form, you may well die from it, and unpleasantly; prostate cancer metastases go to bone and cause a lot of pain. Sadly, however, treatment does not seem to impact this. The “cures” from treatment of prostate cancer are of the ones that would have “cured” themselves, or at least not have manifested with symptoms. The mortality from aggressive deadly cancers is not changed by treatment. This is the critical point that discussions of the sensitivity and specificity of PSA or any other kind of screening often ignores. Not only can they not reliably distinguish between the indolent and aggressive types of cancer well, even if they could and we had a test to reliably tell which one you had, it is only of importance if treatment can make a difference. And in terms of mortality, it doesn’t. What about the other results from treatment? Improved quality of life? Well, here even Dr. Kapoor notes that “cancer treatment can reduce quality of life.” If you consider impotence, urinary incontinence, and the many unpleasant and painful effects of radiation on the rectum to lower quality of life, you betcha.

We can dismiss Dr. Kapoor’s comments by saying he is a urologist, and they make their money treating prostate cancer; can you imagine the impact on their income if we didn’t treat it? But this misses the far bigger issue, which is that we are enamored with – and, more important, spend huge amounts of money on-- high-technology interventions rather than the prosaic, low-tech interventions that have actually been demonstrated to improve the public’s health. Screening for prostate cancer, and overuse and reliance on mammographic screening for breast cancer, are huge industries which (even in breast cancer) have had relatively little impact on mortality. Providing good prenatal care and preventing unwanted pregnancy, ensuring treatment of common diseases like hypertension and diabetes, ensuring that children are not only immunized against infectious disease but are well-fed, well-housed, and well-educated, and free from poisoning by environmental toxins (including bullets) – the basic components of public health and primary care -- may seem less sexy and stimulate our collective psyches less, but they are the things that actually increase population health.

One of the newer fascinations is genomics, the identification of each person’s sequence of DNA. The promise of “precision medicine” is that we will find out who has the risk gene for which disease, and treat it directly and appropriately; treatment for cancer will be based on the genes you have just as treatment for bacterial infections is based on the organism identified by culturing it in a microbiology laboratory. It is so exciting! It is so “sci-fi today”! The American Board of Family Medicine, for example, is planning to create a new self-assessment module (“SAM”, tests that family doctors have to complete one of each year to maintain their Board certification) on genomics. On the other hand, it doesn’t think we need one on contraception, which is too small an area (isn’t it just part of “women’s health”? Oh, do men have a role in contraception also?), unlike genomics, which could affect EVERYTHING!

Except, so far, it hasn’t and there is little evidence to suggest that it will anytime soon. I wrote a blog on the topic on February 1, 2015 (“Precision medicine, trade policy and the cost of drugs: benefiting people or profit for business?) after the appearance of a Times op-ed by Mayo Clinic cancer expert Michael Joyner (“’Moonshot’ medicine will let us down”, January 15, 2015); Dr. Joyner has more recently contributed more comprehensive articles on the topic to JAMA (“Seven questions for personalized medicine[1]) and The Lancet (“Is precision medicine the route to a healthy world?”[2]) in which he makes the important point that most disease is not the result of a single gene, but rather the result of a complex interplay of different genes and the environment. Indeed, the only cancer-specific genes that have been identified so far are the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, and no treatment has emerged; we simply say “get mammograms more often and consider prophylactic mastectomy”.

Spending all this money on precision medicine, on high-tech interventions, expensive drugs and devices is like blowing your house budget on art for the walls before you have built it. Some art is great, some is mediocre, and some is poor, but none will hang well on a jerry-rigged house made poorly of shoddy materials because there was no money left. Some high-tech, expensive interventions are worthwhile but what we really need to increase the population’s health is public health nurses making home visits to pregnant and recently delivered women, and their children; public health nurses or community health workers or even doctors making visits to people’s homes to assess the real risk factors to their health and reasons that they might not be able to comply with treatment plans. We need more primary care, not more interventionalists. But most important, we need to apply what we know works, what we know how to do, to everyone.

That is how we move the needle on population health.

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[1] Joyner MJ, Paneth N, Seven Questions for Personalized Medicine, JAMA. 2015 Jun 22. doi: 10.1001/jama.2015.7725. [Epub ahead of print]

[2] Coote, John H, Joyner, Michael J. Is precision medicine the route to a healthy world?. The Lancet385.9978 (Apr 25, 2015): 1617.

Why don't graduate medical education programs produce the doctors America needs?

In 2010, Fitzhugh Mullan and others from the George Washington University, with collaborators from the American Academy of Family Physicians' (AAFP) Robert Graham Policy Research Center, published the seminal article “The social mission of medical education: ranking the schools” in the Annals of Internal Medicine (discussed in this blog on June 10, 2010 in A New Way of Ranking Medical Schools: Social Mission).  This paper looked at the production of medical schools in the US in terms of whether their graduates were in 3 categories associated with social mission: practice in an underserved area, practicing a primary care specialty, and having a higher percentage of graduates who were members of underrepresented minority groups.  It was the first time such data had been published, and the results showed that most medical schools don’t do very well, and that, in general, those that do the worst are those most often identified as “top” schools by criteria such as National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding or rankings by US News. This is not surprising; enrolling students from high income families who have had top grades at the most elite private and suburban schools, training them in a setting in which the mix of doctors is heavily skewed to the most subspecialized and research-intensive, located in a densely populated urban area, is the precisely wrong formula for recruiting physicians from underserved backgrounds and training them to practice primary care in areas of need. Unfortunately, although there have been small programs implemented at many schools, this model has not seen any significant change in most medical schools, particularly those “most elite”.

This year, this group from the Graham Center and George Washington, with collaborators from the the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM), take the next obvious step in examining the production of the nation’s doctors. In “Toward Graduate Medical Education (GME) Accountability: Measuring the Outcomes of GME Institutions”,[1] in Academic Medicine (not available free on-line; abstract at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23752037), Candice Chen and her colleagues look at how institutions that sponsor GME (and, importantly, get very large amounts of money from Medicare and Medicaid -- $9.3 billion and $3.18 Billion, respectively, in 2009) do in producing specialists in short supply: primary care physicians (defined as family medicine, general internal medicine (GIM), general pediatrics, internal medicine–pediatrics, internal medicine geriatrics, and family medicine geriatrics), general surgeons, obstetrician - gynecologists and psychiatrists. Identifying which program produced who is quite a bit harder than when looking at medical school outcomes; while a medical school is a medical school, GME-sponsoring institutions can be consortia of a medical school and one or more hospitals, and may often sponsor more than one residency program in the same specialty.

As in all measures of primary care production, the big complication is in graduates of internal medicine programs, the majority of whose graduates go into subspecialty (e.g., cardiology, gastroenterology, pulmonary and critical care) fellowships rather than remaining in primary care/general internal medicine (GIM). Chen’s work accounts for this, but explicitly notes that they are unable to account for the percent of GIM graduates who do not go on to subspecialty training but work as hospitalists. These are clearly not in primary care, and by many accounts may represent a majority of those completing the basic internal medicine training but not going on to fellowship. The authors note that, by their calculations, the average for primary care was 25.2%,”… this overestimates primary care production, as we could not account for primary care physicians practicing as hospitalists.”

Just as with medical schools, there was a wide variation in the percent of graduates of different sponsoring institutions who entered these specialties-in-need. Of 759 sponsoring institutions, they ‘…found that 158 institutions produced no primary care graduates, and 184 institutions produced more than 80%; the latter tended to be smaller institutions.” Again no surprise; the larger, more elite and famous sponsoring institutions (most often hospitals associated with elite medical schools) did a terrible job, while the smaller sponsoring institutions -- often hospitals with one (usually family medicine) or a few residencies, in smaller cities and towns, and affiliated with Federally-Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) or Area Health Education Centers (AHECs), based in in underserved urban and rural communities, did well. The Robert Graham Center website provides interactive tools to allow you to map the density of primary care physicians by state, county and other areas, the output of each institution producing residents in terms of location and specialty, and the footprint of graduates from each GME program.

Let me restate: 158 institutions sponsoring graduate medical education produced NO primary care graduates! Let’s add some other numbers from the study: 198 institutions (more than 25% of the total) produced NO rural physicians, while only 10 institutions had all graduates go to rural areas; the average percentage of graduates providing direct patient care in rural areas was 4.8%. 283 institutions (37%) produced NO physicians practicing in FQHCs or rural health clinics (RHCs); 479 (63%!) institutions produced no National Health Service Corps (NHSC; a program for sponsoring physicians for underserved areas) physicians. This performance can be described by a single, simple word: ABYSMAL!

Elite academic medical centers have values that lead them to attract and select students and trainees with characteristics that are the opposite of those needed for training physicians to meet the needs of the American people. They value caring for rarer and highly specialized tertiary and quarternary conditions, which both are highly reimbursed and provide the basis for research in narrow areas of disease (and almost never of health). They value receiving large sums of money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research, most of which is basic laboratory research. These are not bad values; they are, in fact, necessary. We need research, including basic laboratory research and first-in-human studies, for medical science to advance (although we also need a lot more funding for population-based research into the causes of health and disease, and community-based efforts to address them). We need tertiary-care medical centers where rarer or more complex conditions can be most effectively treated by physicians and surgeons whose narrower expertise makes them more experienced and effective.

The problem is that concentrating all these subspecialists in the very places where students and residents are trained gives those learners a very skewed idea of the ratio of subspecialists to primary care doctors, and makes the teachers want to get the “best” students to go into their narrow, subspecialized areas. In addition, selection for medical school (and to a large extent for residencies that are more competitive because they have fewer slots) tend to be for students who have the characteristics that help them to do well in basic science courses, standardized tests, and possibly in laboratory research. These students tend to come from the highest income families of professionals, in the largest metropolitan areas, from elite public or suburban schools. They look a great deal like the people who have plenty of doctors to care for them, and very little like the people whose communities suffer from a dearth of physicians in inner city and rural areas. I have previously noted that, while about 20% of Americans live in rural areas, only about 9% of doctors practice in such areas; this study shows it is actually much worse, with only 4.8% of graduates in rural practice!

The situation is exacerbated by the inequity in income between primary care doctors and subspecialists, an inequity also seen (albeit at a higher level) for general surgeons vs. subspecialty surgeons, especially when hours of work are considered. Thus, students, generally selected from a population not representative of the American people, who have increasing debt (even for those from upper-middle-income, not to mention middle-income and the rare student from low income families), are attracted to specialties that pay the most; if assessments of “lifestyle” are added to the calculus, those that pay the most for the least work (or whose income/work ratios are the highest). This is a formula to continue what we have, not to make things better.

The authors of the paper say that “Primary care physician production of 25.2% and rural physician production of 4.8% will not sustain the current workforce, solve problems of maldistribution, or address acknowledged shortages. The relatively small number of physicians choosing to work in RHCs, FQHCs, HPSAs, and the NHSC will not support a doubling of the capacity of safety net services envisioned by the

Affordable Care Act.” They have that right. Medical schools and GME-sponsoring institutions have for too long been allowed to continue being self-serving, with the biggest institutions being entirely pitiful in terms of producing the doctors America needs. It needs an immediate, far-reaching, large-scale change, where the biggest training programs see themselves in the business of producing primary care doctors for underserved people.

Why would they do that? Well, there is the $9.5 billion in Medicare and $3.18 billion in Medicaid GME funding that could be withheld if they don’t, for a start…

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[1] Chen C, et al., “Toward Graduate Medical Education (GME) Accountability: Measuring the Outcomes of GME Institutions”,  Academic Medicine, Vol. 88, No. 9 / September 2013