• Posted July 6, 2026

Calling Low-Risk Prostate Cancer Something Else Might Save More Lives, Researchers Argue

Men might benefit if doctors quit referring to low-risk prostate cancer as cancer at all, a new study says.

Referring to the lowest-risk type of prostate cancer — Grade Group 1 (GG1) — as cancer does more harm than good, researchers argued recently in the journal JAMA Oncology.

Renaming GG1 as a precancerous or prostate condition rather than cancer could help prevent six times as many prostate cancer deaths each year, according to the researchers’ analysis.

“Patients deserve information that reflects the actual risk of their disease, not just a label that may create fear or confusion,” said senior researcher Dr. Scott Eggener, chair of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles.

“Our hope is that this work encourages a more thoughtful approach to how we define and communicate low-risk prostate cancer,” Eggener added in a news release.

GG1 prostate cancers typically grow slowly over years or decades, if they grow at all, researchers said in background notes. These tumors do not cause symptoms or become life-threatening unless a higher-grade cancer subsequently develops in the prostate.

But being diagnosed with GG1 prostate cancer typically causes men stress and anxiety, researchers noted.

Guidelines recommend a “watch and wait” approach with GG1 cases, but up to 40% of U.S. men become so anxious they opt to be treated with surgery or radiation, researchers said. As a result, they often needlessly suffer side effects like incontinence or impotence.

For the new study, researchers modeled what might happen if GG1 cases were called something other than prostate cancer.

They estimated that about a third (32%) of new prostate cancer diagnoses are GG1 cases, amounting to 100,480 new GG1 prostate disease cases each year.

Researchers figured that relabeling might encourage more men to undergo prostate cancer screening, because they would be less concerned about receiving unnecessary treatment for a benign tumor.

The team weighed that hypothesis against the possibility that men might not take a non-cancer seriously and die from a GG1 that they didn’t adequately track through watchful waiting.

“Changing the terminology does not mean ignoring these tumors or eliminating follow-up care,” Eggener said. “It means recognizing that not all prostate cancer carries the same risk and language should better reflect the biology of the disease.”

Relabeling these cases as something other than cancer would reduce annual prostate deaths overall by about 2,400, researchers concluded.

Calling GG1 tumors something other than cancer would prevent about 2,835 prostate cancers thanks to more men getting screened, but would potentially cause about 452 additional deaths of men who didn’t have their cases actively surveilled, the study found.

This wouldn’t be the first time that new terms have been adopted to help patients better understand the risk from a precancerous condition, Eggener said.

“Medicine has a history of appropriately redefining conditions when terminology no longer accurately reflects risk,” he said. “Similar changes have occurred in other cancers, including bladder, cervical and thyroid cancers, where some conditions once classified as cancer have been redefined to better reflect their extremely low likelihood of causing harm.

“It has even happened before in prostate cancer. For the lowest-risk prostate tumors, removing the cancer label could help patients avoid unnecessary treatment and encourage screening approaches that can further reduce deaths from aggressive prostate cancer,” Eggener said.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more on prostate cancer stages.

SOURCES: UCLA, news release, July 1, 2026; JAMA Oncology, May 21, 2026