Minutes published of UK NSC March 2026 meeting

The UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) has published the minutes of its March 2026 meeting.

See UK NSC meeting March 2026 for the full draft minutes.

At the meeting, committee members agreed to recommend the introduction of the UK’s first prostate cancer screening programme, targeted at one specific cohort, after considering modelling evidence and the results of a 12-week public consultation.

The updated modelling study, commissioned by the UK NSC, predicts the potential impact of various prostate cancer screening strategies, including:

population-wide screening targeted approaches for high-risk groups, including:Black menmen with a family history men with specific gene variants

Based on the updated evidence, the UK NSC agreed a draft recommendation at its November 2025 meeting, which it then put out to public consultation. Committee members reviewed and considered nearly 1,000 responses received during the 12-week consultation. Responses came from stakeholder organisations, health professionals, academics and nearly 900 members of the public.

Subsequently, at its March 2026 meeting, the UK NSC confirmed its updated prostate cancer screening recommendation to be:

for a targeted screening programme, involving prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing every 2 years, for men aged 45 to 61 who have a pathogenic (able to cause disease) BRCA2 variant and a family history of breast, ovarian, pancreatic, or prostate cancer against population screening for prostate cancer against targeted screening for any other risk groups continued close working with UK researchers, including the TRANSFORM trial 1, to address uncertainties in the evidence regarding targeted screening of Black men and other risk groups

The committee concluded that screening is more likely to cause more harm than good in the whole population and in men with a family member who has had breast, ovarian or prostate cancer but who are without a BRCA2 variant. For Black men, there is ongoing uncertainty as to whether prostate cancer screening would cause more good than harm. The main harms of screening include incontinence and erectile dysfunction (impotence) following unnecessary biopsy or treatment.

The UK NSC hopes new evidence, new tests and a better understanding of prostate cancer will support recommendations on wider prostate cancer screening in future. The prostate cancer screening modelling study will remain ‘open’ so that significant new high-quality, peer-reviewed evidence can be considered for future inclusion.

The positive recommendation for screening men with a BRCA2 gene variant is slightly more restrictive that the draft recommendation, which also included screening men with a BRCA1 variant. The change was made after discussions with geneticists using published evidence and risk which concluded that those with a BRCA1 variant are not at a sufficiently elevated risk to suggest that benefits of screening would outweigh the harms.

View the full evidence documents and consultation responses on the updated UK NSC prostate cancer screening recommendation page.

Other topics considered by the UK NSC at its March meeting included:

targeted screening for Lynch syndrome population screening for bladder cancer a review into the effectiveness of the NHS Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy Screening (IDPS) Programme screening for inherited cardiac conditions

1 The TRANSFORM trial is co-funded by Prostate Cancer UK and DHSC (through its research arm the NIHR). It will assess the benefits and harms of various screening strategies and evaluate whether they differ from the assumptions used in the current UK NSC model (in the whole population and in Black men specifically).

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https://nationalscreening.blog.gov.uk/2026/05/28/minutes-published-of-uk-nsc-march-2026-meeting/

seen at 14:52, 28 May in UK National Screening Committee.