Pain relievers like aspirin and ibuprofen appear to lower a man’s PSA level, which is measured annually to screen for prostate cancer. A new study by researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York, said the popular class of pain relievers may mask a man’s risk of getting prostate cancer by modifying the levels of PSA in his blood. Elevated levels of the protein produced by cells in the prostate gland may indicate the presence of prostate cancer.

“We showed that men who regularly took certain medications like aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDS, had a lower serum PSA level,” said Eric A. Singer, a urology resident at the University of Rochester Medical Center and co-author of the study, which appears online Sept. 8 in the journal Cancer. But researchers cautioned that men should not take the medications in an attempt to prevent prostate cancer because the study was limited and it is too soon to draw a conclusion.

The Rochester team analyzed the records of 1319 men over the age of 40 who took part in the 2001-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a health census conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They found that those who took nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, nearly every day had PSA levels about 10 percent lower than men who did not take them.

Meanwhile, the debate over the value of PSA tests continues, with some specialists saying that prostate-cancer screening for men aged 75 and older should be stopped because it puts them at risk for unnecessary worry and side effects of treatments.

According to the American Cancer Society, prostate cancer is the sixth most deadly type of cancer, with about 250,000 deaths yearly.