Prostate cancer screening trial to recruit thousands of men

Major prostate cancer screening trial A study aimed at finding the best way to detect the disease has been launched in the UK.

The first letters inviting men to take part in the study, the largest of its kind in decades, were sent from GPs.

The £42 million Transform trial is funded by Prostate Cancer UK and the National Health and Care Research Institute.

Hashim Ahmed, lead researcher on the study, said: “The transformation is truly game-changing… The start of recruitment today is a crucial step towards delivering the results men urgently need to make prostate cancer diagnosis safe and more effective so we can unlock the potential of prostate cancer screening in the UK.”

The trial will include men aged 50 to 74, with a cutoff age of 45 for black men, who are twice as likely to develop and die from prostate cancer compared to white men.

It will not be possible to volunteer for the trial but Prostate Cancer UK strongly encourages anyone who receives a letter to take part.

The trial will examine how quickly MRI scans of the prostate can be combined with prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood tests to improve the accuracy of cancer diagnosis.

Currently, men over 50 can request a PSA test, which looks for abnormally high protein levels in the blood, but this is unreliable; It detects many prostate cancers that never need treatment and misses others that do.

The trial will also use saliva tests that extract DNA from saliva to see if this is more accurate than PSA readings.

Matthew Hobbs, Director of Prostate Cancer Research UK, said current diagnostic methods were not detecting sufficiently aggressive cancers and were causing too much harm.

“We hear from men who were diagnosed late and whose lives could have been saved if they had been screened or tested earlier. We also hear from many men who are experiencing incontinence or impotence due to the treatments they have received,” Mr Hobbs said.

“Some of these men didn’t need to receive these treatments, and that’s the harm we need to avoid.”

Danny Burkey, 60, from West Yorkshire, has terminal prostate cancer. When he was diagnosed four years ago, the disease had already spread to his bones.

The former teacher and father of three told the BBC that if men were offered regular screening from the age of 50, his disease could be caught while it is still treatable.

“I think a screening program would be a game changer. If you don’t want men to be in the situation I was in and we want to stop 12,000 men dying prematurely every year, this is the obvious solution.”

The launch of the trial comes a week before the National Screening Committee (NSC), a specialist body that advises the NHS, announces whether it will recommend introducing screening for the disease, which is the most common cancer in men in the UK.

Previously, the NSC concluded that the harms of screening outweigh its benefits.

The first results of the Transform trial will be announced in around two years and will then be expanded to 300,000 men across the UK.