Fewer men should get prostate cancer screening, committee recommends

Most men in the UK will not be offered prostate cancer screening if the government accepts the final recommendation of an expert committee. The UK National Screening Committee (UKNSC) said attempting to detect the disease using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test was “likely to cause more harm than good”. However, it said men with the BRCA2 gene variant, which put them at higher risk of prostate cancer, should be screened every two years between the ages of 45 and 61 if they had a family history of certain cancers. It recommended against screening for other at-risk groups, including black men, saying there was “ongoing uncertainty on whether screening would cause more good than harm”. The main harms of population screening included incontinence and erectile dysfunction in men who did not need treatment for the disease. Prof Sir Mike Richards, the chair of the UKNSC, said: “We absolutely recognise the strong support for prostate cancer screening among a large number of people, but also the very real harm that can be caused by the disease, which patients, and indeed their families, experience. “We do know that screening can reduce deaths from prostate cancer to a small extent, and it does not improve overall survival.” He said many men “will live full lives” without the disease causing harm, and screening could “only help if it can separate out that harmful disease from the harmless disease”. …