Recent advances have made PSA screening for prostate cancer more effective — so much so that current federal guidelines that now recommend against routine screening for men should be updated, a top doctor argues.

"Advanced techniques have made prostate screening more accurate," says urologist Deepak Kapoor, M.D., in The New York Times. "It's time to bring it back."

The latest research on prostate cancer has helped make screening more individualized than the former one-size-fits-all measurement of the level of prostate-specific antigen in a man’s blood of the past.

As a result, Dr. Kapoor argues it’s time to re-evaluate the nation’s current approach to prostate cancer.

“Even though we anticipate 221,000 new diagnoses this year, and 28,000 deaths, recommendations drafted in 2010 and finalized in 2012 strongly discourage PSA screening men without symptoms for this disease,” he notes.

“Those decisions didn’t take into account adaptations that urologists have made to help better identify patients likely to develop deadly prostate cancers. Some tools, called PSA derivatives, were being developed as early as the mid-1990s, and all have been refined since.”

As a result, doctors have a “clearer picture” of a patient’s prostate cancer risk, based on new tools that adjust for interpretations of readings for age, race, and the size of the a man’s prostate.

Dr. Kapoor, a urologist, is a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and chairman of health policy for the Large Urology Group Practice Association.