UK National Screening Committee rejects call from Olympic legend Sir Chris Hoy to offer PSA test to all men at higher risk of prostate cancer12:00, 28 May 2026Health chiefs have finally rejected calls for more men to be routinely tested for prostate cancer.‌The UK National Screening Committee warns routine testing causes many men to needlessly go under the knife and has refused to check more at risk such as Black men and those with a close family history of the disease.‌It comes despite a campaign by Olympic legend Sir Chris Hoy, who has a terminal diagnosis, supported by charities and a host of politicians calling for more men to get routine checks.‌The UKNSC used population modelling and concluded current blood tests are not reliable enough and likely to over-treat men for too many benign tumours which would have never caused them harm.The committee’s final recommendation said wider screening would not reduce deaths overall when all causes were considered but did recommend it for “a few thousand” men with the BRCA gene.‌Professor Sir Mike Richards, UKNSC chair, said: “We absolutely recognise the strong support for prostate cancer screening. We do know that screening can reduce deaths from prostate cancer to a small extent [but] it does not improve overall survival.“We know that prostate cancer often grows very slowly in men. Many men will live full lives without it causing harm. Screening can only help if it can separate out that harmful disease from the harmless disease.”Prostate cancer has become the most common cancer in Britain due in part to better awareness of the disease as more men get checked. Men can currently request a blood test from their GP if they experience symptoms.‌Cycling Gold medalist Sir Chris has worked with Prostate Cancer UK to call for men with known risk factors to be invited to have a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test once they reach a certain age, regardless of whether they are experiencing symptoms. Former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Rishi Sunak both backed the move. However the PSA test is notoriously unreliable.The powerful committee told a media briefing that while screening would reduce some prostate cancer deaths, this appeared to be balanced by it causing other men to die younger from other causes.‌It said that was because routinely offering the PSA test to more at risk men would lead to overdiagnosis and over treatment.Overtreatment typically involves removal of the prostate which can leave impotent and with urinary incontinence. It can also involve gruelling chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Overtreatment can harm quality of life and in some cases shorten it.Prof Richards added: “Once prostate cancer is found, we still can't reliably tell which cancers need treatment and which do not. There is a spectrum there. Treatments available for prostate cancer can cause long lasting harm and those will include both urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction.”‌Professor Freddie Hamdy, committee member and cancer surgeon at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals, said that once diagnosed men were given a “lifetime cancer label”. He said men struggled to live with that label and stick with “active monitoring” without undergoing surgery to remove their prostate - which they then often regret.Prof Hamdy said: “I can give you an example… you have a man with a small prostate cancer. You give him all the counselling and say ‘these are the consequences of surgery’. He will say ‘I don’t care - I just want it out’.“He comes back in a year and he doesn’t have any cancer but he has lost his erections and he says how he’s really suffering with that. Of course, you try to help but their perspective changes once the fear has gone.”‌The committee caused anger when it published draft guidance last November rejecting widespread prostate cancer screening apart from a targeted screening programme every two years for men with a confirmed BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic variant, which puts them at greater risk.Following a three-month public consultation, this targeted screening for those at genetic risk has been restricted to only men with a BRCA2 variant and a family history of the disease.Prof Anneke Lucassen, committee member and Oxford University genomics expert, said: “It's important to remember that many people have a family history because cancer is common rather than because of a particular inherited risk factor.‌“If you look at general and family history alone, the harms outweighed the benefits [in the modelling] with overdiagnosis and overtreatment being more likely.”Less than 5% of prostate cancers are linked to BRCA genetic risk. The government will now consider the committee’s recommendation and is likely to accept it.Dr Ian Walker, executive director at Cancer Research UK, said: “Today's announcement, following an independent expert review, that the currently available evidence doesn’t support a broader prostate cancer screening programme will be disappointing for many people, but the PSA test currently used to detect prostate cancer is not effective enough to support wider screening, as shown in multiple large-scale trials.‌“Screening decisions must be guided by the current evidence, with programmes only introduced when the benefits are shown to outweigh the harms, including unnecessary and invasive overtreatment. We urge the UK Government to accept the UKNSC's recommendation.”Chiara De Biase, director at Prostate Cancer UK, said: "We're deeply disappointed with this final recommendation. Without a screening programme for the UK's most common cancer, we lose more than 12,000 dads, brothers, and partners every single year.“We know that a mass screening programme could save thousands of men’s lives, and while we recognise the current evidence does not yet show that screening all men at risk would do more good than harm, today's decision is a step backwards, narrowing the recommendation to a smaller pool of eligible men.”Article continues belowA spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: "The Secretary of State will give full and careful consideration to the recommendation from the independent UKNSC and will update on the government’s response shortly.”