The UK National Screening Committee (NSC) has opened a public consultation on prostate cancer screening, following its decision to not recommend population screening.
The Committee commissioned the Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research (SCHARR) to develop the updated 2025 prostate cancer screening modelling study. The SCHARR report predicts the potential impact of various screening strategies, including population screening and targeted approaches aimed at high-risk groups including black men, men with a family history and men with a BRCA gene variation.
The NSC has now opened a 12-week public consultation period to ask individuals and organisations to provide feedback on this study and its conclusions, and on the draft recommendation.
The NSC’s draft recommendation is to:
- offer a targeted national prostate cancer screening programme to men with confirmed BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene variants every two years, from age 45 to age 61
- not recommend population screening
- not recommend targeted screening of Black men
- not recommend targeted screening of men with family history.
Additional, the Committee says it will collaborate with the Transform screening research trial team to answer outstanding questions on screening effectiveness for black men and men with a family history – as soon as trial data becomes available. When trial results are available, the NSC will work to develop and trial a more accurate test than PSA alone, to improve the balance of benefit and harm of screening
To take part in the consultation, visit the UK NSC’s prostate cancer recommendation page. The consultation is open until Friday 20 February 2026.
The UK NSC secretariat and SCHARR team will review the consultation responses to determine whether the model and literature review need amending. If no further work is required then final evidence reports and feedback from the consultation will go to the 26 March 2026 UK NSC meeting when members are expected to agree a final updated recommendation.
If the consultation responses identify a requirement to revisit the modelling and evidence summary, then it will be updated and considered by the UK NSC at the earliest possible opportunity.
The UK NSC does not currently recommend a national screening programme for prostate cancer.
Its previous evidence reviews found that the harms of screening outweighed the benefits due to:
- high rates of false positive and false negative results from the prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test, which is the usual first step to getting a prostate cancer diagnosis
- the difficulty of distinguishing between harmless, low risk prostate cancers and aggressive cancers that need treatment
- the overtreatment of prostate cancers that would not have gone on to cause harm
- the potential serious life-long side effects of treatment, including urinary incontinence, faecal incontinence and erectile dysfunction.