Is it time for prostate cancer screening?

13/01/23 . News

In Scotland one man in three with prostate cancer is detected too late to be cured, according to new data from Prostate Cancer UK. In London, it is one in eight. This cannot carry on.

Prostate cancer is very common. Every day, about 140 men in the UK are told they have they have the disease. Every year, about 12,000 men die.

But, all the while we have no routine screening for prostate cancer, detection will be down to luck and, as this research shows, a postcode lottery.

In the past we haven't been able to screen for prostate cancer because we haven't had a test which was accurate enough. In fact, the tests we have had have led to over-diagnosis and over-treatment.

All that may be about to change. Read our article: Prostate Cancer Screening - where are we now? for the full story.

We could be at the start of a journey that will make prostate screening for men as routine as breast screening is for women.

The Men’s Health Forum need your support

It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking.

In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to.

It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for.

We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing.

Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.

Registered with the Fundraising Regulator