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Prostate cancer screening is just as good as the routine checks women have for breast cancer, according to a new study.
Researchers say the findings show it no longer makes sense to reject prostate cancer screening on the one hand while endorsing screening for breast cancer on the other.
Dr Sigrid Carlsson, who led the study at the German Cancer Research Centre, said: “If prostate cancer screening were extended to the wider population, then the outcomes are likely to be very similar to breast cancer.”
Prostate cancer kills more than 12,000 men a year in the UK, slightly more than the number of women who die from breast cancer.
But while older women have been screened for breast cancer in the UK since 1988, government advisers have always ruled there isn’t enough evidence to back prostate screening in men.
Olympic champion Sir Chris Hoy and former prime minister Lord David Cameron, who have both been diagnosed with the cancer, have called for the UK to introduce screening so more men are diagnosed at an earlier, treatable stage.
The new research analysed results from the PROBASE trial of just over 39,000 men having prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood tests in combination with MRI scans, and compared them with those from 2.8 million women having a mammogram as part of Germany’s breast cancer screening programme.
Encouragingly, prostate screening detected up to 74% of cancers that had begun to spread, roughly the same proportion picked up by routine mammograms, according…
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