[General practical survey of individual prostate cancer screening]

To assess the practices of general practitioners in the Auvergne region concerning individual prostate cancer screening, to compare these practices with published guidelines and to identify those points that are most difficult to perform.

An anonymous postal survey using a predefined questionnaire was conducted among 1339 general practitioners in the Auvergne region identified by the URSSAF file on 1st January 2006. This was a declarative survey with no individual financial reward. The questionnaire comprised three aspects: general practitioner identification criteria, screening practices and the doctors' opinion concerning guidelines.

The participation rate was 49.1: 98.3% of general practitioners declared that they proposed screening and 89.5% declared that they proposed screening to all men within certain age limits, from 50 to 75 years in 80.8% of cases. Only 4.6% of doctors provided complete preliminary information to their patients. Among the doctors,75.6% combined digital rectal examination and total PSA assay, but in the presence of an abnormality, only 10.5% referred their patients directly to an urologist without prescribing other complementary investigations (first- or second-line). Finally, 53.5% of doctors considered that published guidelines were adapted to their clinical practice.

Individual prostate cancer screening is massively proposed, but differences are observed between the doctors' reported practices and official guidelines. This study emphasizes the need to provide patients with clear and complete information and to improve the general practitioners' knowledge on screening tests and patient referral in the case of positive screening tests.