Two studies published on Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association have suggested that fewer men have been screened for prostate cancer, and fewer early-stage cases have been detected.

The researchers said the number of cases has fallen not because the disease was becoming less common but because less effort has been put to find it.

The authors of one of the studies wrote that the fall in both screening and incidence ‘ may have major public health implications’, but they mentioned that it was quite early to tell whether the changes would have an impact on death rates from the disease or not.

As per the American Cancer Society, in 2015, nearly 220,800 new prostate cancer cases are likely, along with 27,540 deaths.

Since long an intense debate is going on over screening for prostate cancer, such as mammography for breast cancer, with advocates saying that it saves lives and detractors have been arguing that it results into too much needless treatment.

The decline in testing is most probably an outcome of a recommendation against screening made by the United States Preventive Services Task Force in 2012. The task force, including an independent panel of experts selected by the government, discovered that risks overshadowed the advantages of routine blood tests for prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, a protein linked to prostate cancer.

As prostate cancer generally grows slowly, the panel said that in screening many tumors are found that might have never have harmed the patient, but are treated anyway. Thus they concluded that testing saves few lives and puts many men into unnecessary surgery or radiation, often leaving them impotent and incontinent.