Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to support the national prostate cancer screening programme.

There is currently no national prostate cancer screening programme. This is because it is not recommended by the UK National Screening Committees (UK NSC) due to the inaccuracy of the current best test, called the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA). A PSA-based screening programme could harm some men, as many would be diagnosed with a cancer that would not have caused them problems during their life. This would lead to additional tests and treatments which can also have harmful side effects, for instance sexual dysfunction and incontinence.

The UK NSC is carrying out an evidence review for prostate cancer screening, which includes different potential ways of screening the whole population from 40 years of age onwards, and targeted screening programmes aimed at groups of men identified as being at higher-than-average risk, such as those with a family history, carriers of the BRCA2 gene mutation, and based on ethnicity.