Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risks
By Mayo Clinic staffA testicular exam doesn't pose any risks. If you notice a cause for concern, however, the follow-up exam might lead to unnecessary worry and medical attention. For example, if you discover a suspicious lump, you may end up having a procedure to remove tissue for examination (biopsy). If it turns out the lump was noncancerous (benign), you might feel that you've undergone an invasive procedure unnecessarily.
Testicular self-exams alone don't reduce the number of deaths from testicular cancer. Because of the low incidence of testicular cancer and the potential for unnecessary anxiety and intervention, some men choose not to do routine testicular exams.
- Moul JW. Timely diagnosis of testicular cancer. The Urologic Clinics of North America. 2007;24:109.
- Bohnenkamp S, et al. The medical-surgical nurse's guide to testicular cancer. Medsurg Nursing: The Official Journal of the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses. 2009;18:116.
- How to do a testicular self-examination. The Testicular Cancer Resource Center. http://tcrc.acor.org/tcexam.html. Accessed June 17, 2009.
- Testicular cancer: Questions and answers. National Cancer Institute. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/sites-types/testicular. Accessed June 17, 2009.
- Do I have testicular cancer? American Cancer Society. http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_2_3X_Do_I_Have_Testicular_Cancer.asp. Accessed July 16, 2009.
- Shaw J. Diagnosis and treatment of testicular cancer. American Family Physician. 2008;77:469.
- Screening for testicular cancer: Recommendation statement. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/3rduspstf/testicular/testiculrs.pdf. Accessed July 16, 2009.
