Rachel Barrett

IF GETTING A screening test for prostate cancer isn’t on your radar, it’s probably because the government guidelines essentially told you not to bother back in 2012. But prostate cancer rates have continued to rise . It’s now the second leading cause of cancer deaths in men, and it’s particularly lethal for Black men, who are more than twice as likely to die from it as white men. The guidelines have evolved.

The reason to consider the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test now isn’t any big, headline-grabbing news that there’s a whole new way to test for it (there isn’t yet). It’s not even that PSA testing is now associated with about a 13 percent reduction in deaths from cancer and a 35 percent reduction in metastatic cancer diagnoses. It’s that the entire landscape of what happens after a troublesome result has shifted.

A high PSA number used to fast-track you to an uncomfortable or potentially infection-causing biopsy and hustle you to radiation or surgery.…