Prostate cancer diagnoses have been rising in recent years, with a sharp increase in cases diagnosed at advanced stages, when it is harder to treat, according to a new report by the American Cancer Society. Many experts attributed the increase to a guideline change made over a decade ago that discouraged routine screening for the common cancer.

The new analysis also highlighted racial disparities that have persisted, despite overall declines in mortality. Black men develop prostate cancer at significantly higher rates than white men and die at twice the rate of white men. Native Americans die at higher rates although they have a lower incidence of the disease.

The report, published on Tuesday in the medical journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, underscores the challenge of finding the right balance in cancer screening: Screen too much and you may end up causing harm by aggressively treating indolent disease that will never be life-threatening; screen too little and you may miss deadly disease.

Dr. Bill Dahut, chief scientific officer for the American Cancer Society and one of the authors of the new report, tied a recommendation by a national task force to pull back on routine prostate cancer screening to the rise in the diagnosis of more advanced cancers.

“The pendulum may have swung too far in one direction, where we were afraid of overtreatment,” Dr. Dahut said, “and now we’re not finding these cancers early on, when they can be treated and are more curable, and we’re more likely to find metastatic disease that is not curable.”

In 2012, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which makes recommendations for preventive health care services in the United States, started discouraging routine administration of the blood tests that are used to screen healthy men for prostate cancer.