Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of expanding screenings for lung cancer to also include screening for dementia.

No assessment has been made. The lung cancer screening programme is a targeted screening programme for people aged between 55 and 74 years old identified as being at high risk of lung cancer. Any proposals to modify a screening programme, such as adding an additional condition to it should be submitted via the UK National Screening Committee’s (UK NSC) annual call for topics and must be underpinned by published peer reviewed evidence that supports this targeted approach.

The UK NSC has separately examined the evidence for dementia and made a recommendation in 2019 not to introduce this as a population screening programme. More information is available at the following link:

https://view-health-screening-recommendations.service.gov.uk/dementia/