Ben Stiller reveals he had prostate cancer 2 years ago

U.S. actor Ben Stiller revealed on Tuesday that he suffered from prostate cancer two years ago but recovered and is now cancer-free because doctors detected it in time thanks to a routine exam.

“It came out of the blue for me. I had no idea. At first, I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I was scared. It just stopped everything in your life because you can’t plan for a movie because you don’t know what’s gonna happen”, Stiller said on The Howard Stern Show.

The 50-year-old Hollywood star said he decided to talk about his cancer experience because he is convinced that the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test he had during his yearly checkup “saved my life.”

Since then, the star of “Zoolander” said, he has the PSA test every six months to guarantee that he’s doing OK, adding that prostate cancer is the second deadliest type of cancer but also “one of the most curable” if detected in its early stages.

Stiller said that when he was first diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 48 he looked up information about it on the Internet to learn more and saw that his friend Robert De Niro also had the disease in 2003, and so he contacted him and put himself into the hands of De Niro’s physician.

The actor said that the first time he had had the PSA test was at age 46 during a routine physical and already at that time his PSA levels were “high” but not alarming, and so his doctor recommended that he repeat the test every six months.

“If I hadn’t gotten the test ... I still wouldn’t know”, added Stiller, defending the test despite the controversy surrounding it, which - he said - exists because once a man begins undergoing treatment for prostate cancer he can potentially become incontinent or impotent.

Prostate cancer affects one out of every six men, but many experts say that PSA tests are not very precise and may lead to “false positive” results or unnecessary treatment of nonlethal cancers.