April 9, 2025

Prostate cancer screening in the UK – what does the evidence say?

Unlike other common cancers such as breast, bowel, and cervical cancers, there’s currently no nationwide screening programme for prostate cancer in the UK. While it might seem intuitive that we should introduce such a programme to identify and treat cases of the most common cancer in men, in reality it’s a lot more complex. The decision making behind the introduction of national screening programmes involves weighing up the test’s effectiveness against potential harms from false positive and negative results, as well as its cost/benefit analysis.

Multiple trials have investigated prostate screening over the years, commonly using the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) Test, which found issues around the rates of both false positives, potentially causing unnecessary anxiety, investigations, and treatments, and false negatives, leading to missed cancers. However, there is still a lot of research going on to improve prostate cancer screening by, for example, combining this PSA test with MRI scans to improve accuracy, or the possibility of having a targeted screening programmes for subpopulations with higher rates of prostate cancer.

Journalists came along to this briefing to hear experts in the field discuss the current state of the scientific evidence on prostate cancer screening and answer questions such as:

• Why don’t we currently have a prostate cancer screening programme in the UK? What’s the scientific evidence that has led to that decision?
• What further evidence/improvements would we need to support a prostate screening programme in the UK?
• What prostate cancer screening is currently provided in the UK and to whom?
• What research is going on to improve the accuracy/efficacy of the prostate screening test?
• What does the evidence say on the possibility of introducing a targeted prostate screening programme?
• Beyond screening what other research is going to improve diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer?

Speakers included:

Prof Freddie Hamdy CBE, Nuffield Professor of Surgery and Professor of Urology at the University of Oxford, and Honorary Consultant Urological Surgeon at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals

Prof Derek Rosario, Consultant Urological Surgeon, Honorary Professor at the University of Sheffield, and Clinical Advisor (Prostate) to the UK National Screening Committee

Prof Richard Martin, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & Associate Pro Vice Chancellor (Research & Innovation), University of Bristol

Prof Jenny Donovan OBE, Professor of Social Medicine, University of Bristol