Gathering knowledge about prostate cancer screening in Europe
This work, co-ordinated by Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands, is now completed.
A number of systematic reviews have been completed to provide a state-of-play report on prostate cancer screening in all EU countries. These have established a valuable knowledge base on which to build a model for effective screening programmes.
You can view some of the data collected by following these links:
Country by country information
Country by country fact sheets
Review of historical evidence of prostate cancer screening
Review of evidence on current recommendations and practice on screening
Review of studies about prostate cancer early detection
Understanding barriers to prostate cancer early detection
Review of cost-effectiveness of prostate cancer screening in Europe
PRAISE-U has also developed 21 indicators to help policymakers monitor and evaluate the status of prostate cancer screening programmes. These indicators were based on systematic reviews conducted for other cancer screening programmes under another EU-funded project called CanScreen ECIS, led by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. These indicators have been reviewed and refined by PRAISE-U and external prostate cancer screening experts.
The indicators are: invitation coverage, examination coverage, participation rate, retention rate, test result, positive predictive value (PPV), false positive rate to detect any PCa (7.1) and clinically significant PCa (7.2), compliance with risk assessment, compliance with further assessment, prostate cancer detection rate, compliance with treatment, complications of screening test, complications of further assessment, opportunistic testing, cause-specific mortality, crude Incidence rate, interval cancer rate, delay time, radiologist’s assessment of MRI, compliance with biopsy, active surveillance.
You can read more about how the performance indicators will work in this eClinicalMedicine article published in February 2025.