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The number of new cases of advanced prostate cancer in the United States has soared by about 72 percent in the last decade, according to a new study. (emphasis added)

The report, published today in in Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases, a journal from Nature, prompted researchers to question whether a recent trend of fewer men being screened may be contributing to the rise.

“One hypothesis is the disease has become more aggressive, regardless of the change in screening,” senior study author Dr. Edward Schaeffer, chair of urology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Medicine, said in a statement. “The other idea is since screening guidelines have become more lax, when men do get diagnosed, it’s at a more advanced stage of disease. Probably both are true. We don’t know for sure but this is the focus of our current work.”

The researchers looked at information from the National Cancer Data Base, which included more than 767,000 men from 1,089 medical facilities nationwide […]