Prostate Cancer Screening

Lord Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, coming back to the Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, it is disappointing that the screening committee did not approve of screening for people with a strong family history, particularly of breast cancer, which the Minister mentioned, as BRCA genes are also associated with prostate cancer. So the screening committee might be asked to look at the evidence of family linkage to see whether that should not be included in “high risk”. By the way, coming to a better test than PSA, there is the promise of a saliva test with a higher specificity developed by Marsden cancer research institute. That is going to trial, and it may help.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

The noble Lord is my go-to person for additional information in this area, and his knowledge is helpful in this debate. My understanding—he will obviously correct me afterwards if I am wrong—is that there is a much more defined relationship, in the research that has been done into breast cancer, in the likelihood of familial pass-on. That is exactly what this research has been set up to do: to look at whether there are the same patterns with prostate cancer, which have not yet been identified.