How Ben Stiller Beat Prostate Cancer

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If you’re a healthy man in your forties with no family history of prostate cancer and you’re not African American (a group with increased risk for prostate cancer), should you get regular PSA testing? If you were to ask actor/comedian/director Ben Stiller that question, he’d definitely say yes. Dr. Danoff explains why he agrees with Stiller that PSA testing can save lives.

How Ben Stiller Beat Prostate Cancer

In an article written for Medium, actor Ben Stiller revealed that he was diagnosed with early prostate cancer—and beat it—in 2014. When I saw him on television recently, he looked fit, alert, and vigorous and bore no apparent adverse effects from his battle with cancer.

Stiller reported that his diagnosis was initially made because his PSA (prostate-specific antigen) level was elevated. The controversy surrounding the efficacy of PSA testing in a man who shows no cancer symptoms and is not deemed at high risk (no family history of cancer and not of a vulnerable ethnicity) has been hotly debated, but in this case, the test seems justified.





     —Bill Maher, host of HBO’s
Real Time with Bill Maher




Photo by Eva Rinaldi, (CC BY-SA 2.0)