My Dad Had Prostate Cancer. When Do I Get Checked?

If your father had prostate cancer, the question that follows is a fair one: when should you get checked yourself? The honest starting point is that there is no national prostate cancer screening programme in the UK, so nobody will post you an invitation. Whether and when you have a PSA test is a decision you make with your GP, and a father or brother who was diagnosed is exactly the kind of family history that should bring that conversation forward rather than settle it.

This catches people out, because breast and bowel cancer both have organised screening that arrives by letter at a set age. Prostate cancer does not, and it is not an oversight. The PSA blood test — what most men mean by "getting checked" — is not reliable enough to screen a whole healthy population without doing roughly as much harm as good. That does not make it useless. It makes it a test to use deliberately, with your own family history in front of you.

So the short version of when to get checked is this: talk to your GP, tell them your father was diagnosed and roughly how old he was, and ask for the PSA conversation. Do not assume either that you are doomed or that there is nothing to be done. This article walks through what that conversation covers, why the UK has no screening programme, and — because you may have an insurance form open at the same time — exactly how a PSA result sits on a life insurance application.

The short answer: there is no screening programme, so it is a GP conversation

Britain screens for some cancers and not others, and the difference is not about how serious they are. It is about whether a test exists that reliably finds the cancer early, in people with no symptoms, without causing more problems than it solves. For prostate cancer, the available test does not clear that bar, so the UK National Screening Committee has not recommended a national programme.

What exists instead is an informed choice. If you are a man aged 50 or over, you can ask your GP for a PSA test, and the GP is expected to talk you through the trade-offs first. There is no age at which the NHS starts doing this to you automatically. The initiative has to come from you, which is precisely why a father's diagnosis matters: it is the prompt that turns a vague worry into a specific appointment.

The NHS sets out the position on the PSA testing page on nhs.uk, including the fact that men over 50 can request the test and what the result does and does not mean. It is worth reading before the appointment so that the conversation is a shared one rather than a list of things you did not know to ask.

Does your father's prostate cancer actually raise your risk?

Yes, it does, though by less than the fear usually assumes. Having a father or brother diagnosed with prostate cancer roughly raises your own risk compared with a man who has no affected relatives. The increase is larger where a relative was diagnosed at a younger age, and larger again where more than one close relative was affected. Black men carry a higher risk than white men regardless of family history, and a Black man with an affected relative sits higher still.

Two things are worth holding onto here. First, a raised relative risk is not a diagnosis and not a sentence. Plenty of men with an affected father never develop prostate cancer, and plenty of men with no family history do. Second, prostate cancer is common and often slow, and many men who have it die with it rather than of it. A family history changes the odds you start from; it does not tell you your ending.

Cancer Research UK keeps an accessible summary of the risk factors, including family history and ethnicity, on its prostate cancer risks and causes pages. If you want to give your GP the fullest picture, it helps to know your father's age at diagnosis and whether any grandfather, uncle or brother was affected too, because that pattern is what shifts the clinical judgement.

What a PSA test actually measures, and its two failings

PSA stands for prostate-specific antigen, a protein made by the prostate that can be measured in a blood sample. A higher level can be a sign of prostate cancer. It can also be raised by entirely benign things: an enlarged prostate, a urine infection, recent vigorous exercise, or even recent ejaculation. So a raised PSA is a reason to look more closely, not an answer in itself.

The test has two failings, and understanding both is the whole point of the conversation. The first is that it misses cancers: some prostate cancers do not push PSA up much, so a normal result is reassuring rather than a guarantee. The second is the opposite problem, and it is the one that surprises people. The PSA test frequently flags cancers that were never going to cause harm — slow, indolent growths that a man would have died with, unnoticed, at a great age. Finding those can lead to biopsies and treatment, with their own real side effects, for a cancer that would never have troubled the man at all. That is called overdiagnosis, and it is the reason screening the whole population is not recommended.

None of this means the test is worthless. For a man with a family history who understands the trade-off, a PSA test done with eyes open is a reasonable thing to choose. The message is not "avoid it". The message is "know what a result will and will not have told you before you have it".

When to have the conversation, and what to ask

For most men the PSA conversation belongs at around 50. Where a father or brother was affected — and especially if he was diagnosed young, or several relatives were — many GPs will happily have it earlier, in your forties. There is no single national trigger age for family history, which is exactly why it is a discussion tailored to you rather than a rule you can look up.

Useful things to raise at the appointment: your father's age when he was diagnosed; whether he is or was one of several affected relatives; your ethnicity; and any urinary symptoms of your own, such as needing to pass urine more often or a weaker flow, though early prostate cancer frequently causes no symptoms at all. Ask the GP directly what a raised result would lead to, so that you go in already knowing the path a positive test opens: usually a repeat test, an MRI, and possibly a biopsy.

It is worth being clear-eyed about why any of this matters for the outlook. Prostate cancer found while it is still confined to the prostate is treated very differently, and has a very different prognosis, from prostate cancer found once it has spread. Survival in England depends heavily on the stage at which the cancer is caught — a gradient that is wider than the difference family history alone makes. That is the honest case for having the conversation early: not because a relative's diagnosis dictates your fate, but because catching anything early is where the real leverage sits.

Source: NHS England, National Disease Registration Service, Cancer Survival in England, cancers diagnosed 2018 to 2022.

How a PSA result sits on a life insurance application

Here the news is more mixed, and it is better to know it plainly. Much online worry about "getting tested and then being penalised by insurers" is imported from the world of genetic testing, where the UK has strong protections. A PSA test is not a genetic test. It is an ordinary blood test, and the Code on Genetic Testing and Insurance — which stops insurers asking for predictive genetic results — does not cover it at all.

What that means in practice is straightforward. A PSA result sits in your GP record like any other blood result. If a life insurance application asks whether you have had tests or investigations, that is a question you must answer with reasonable care. And if the insurer asks for a report from your GP — which it can only do with your consent — a raised PSA, a referral, or an investigation can be seen and taken into account. This is not a trap; it is how medical underwriting has always worked. The distinction to keep straight is that a genetic result is protected and a PSA result is not.

It is also worth resisting a tempting but flawed conclusion — that the way to protect your application is to avoid ever being tested. Declining a PSA test that your GP thinks is sensible in order to keep your insurance record clean trades a real clinical benefit for a paperwork one, and it is a poor bargain. A family history is not, in itself, a reason to reach for a plan you cannot be asked any questions about either; we set out why in our piece on why a family history is no reason for a no-questions plan. The better route, if you want cover in place, is to answer honestly and let a family history be priced properly, which on mortgage cover often costs far less than people expect.

If you do decide to arrange cover, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker put your actual health and family history in front of insurers whose approaches to it differ. Where one company loads a history, another may take a milder view, which is the single strongest argument for comparing rather than accepting the first answer.

The wider point for a son, not just a patient

There is a second reason men land on this question, and it is not only medical. Watching a father go through prostate cancer, or lose his life to it, tends to make a man look hard at what would happen to his own household if the worst arrived early. That is a healthier instinct than it feels, and it is worth separating from the PSA question entirely.

Whatever your own risk turns out to be, the practical protection for a family is cover sized to the things they actually depend on your income for — a mortgage, the years until children are grown. If you have young children, the choice between a single lump sum and a regular replacement income is a real one, and we walk through it in our guide to what a father dying young leaves a family, and whether a lump sum or a monthly income serves them better. If your own father has died, there is often the separate task of finding whether he held any cover at all, which we cover in how to find out whether a parent had any life cover. And if what you are really carrying is the wider fear that runs in a family, our guide to family history, inherited risk and the odds puts the numbers in proportion.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

The core position is the same across the UK: there is no national prostate cancer screening programme anywhere in Britain or Northern Ireland, because screening policy is set on a UK-wide basis by the UK National Screening Committee. A man aged 50 or over can ask his GP for a PSA test in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland alike.

What differs is the machinery around it, because the NHS is run separately in each nation. Referral routes, waiting times and the exact local guidance a GP follows can vary between NHS England, NHS Scotland, NHS Wales and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland. The insurance position does not vary: consumer insurance law and the genetics Code apply across the whole UK, so a PSA result is treated the same way by an insurer wherever in the UK you live.

Frequently asked questions

Is there prostate cancer screening in the UK?

No. There is no national screening programme, because the PSA blood test misses some cancers and flags others that would never have caused harm. Instead, men aged 50 and over can ask their GP for a PSA test after a discussion of what the result can and cannot tell them.

Does my father's prostate cancer raise my own risk?

Having a father or brother diagnosed does increase risk, and the risk is higher again for Black men and where several relatives were affected or were diagnosed young. That is a reason to have the PSA conversation with your GP earlier rather than to assume any particular outcome.

Does a PSA test affect a life insurance application?

A PSA test is a blood test, not a genetic test, so the Code on Genetic Testing and Insurance does not cover it. If the result is in your GP record and you are asked about tests, or a GP report is obtained with your consent, it can be seen and taken into account.