Prostate Cancer Awareness Month 2026

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) estimates that in 2024 prostate cancer was the second most commonly occurring cancer in men and the fourth most commonly occurring cancer overall. More than 1.5 million cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed worldwide that year, representing almost 8% of the total cancer burden.

IARC researchers are leading or participating in several projects to improve screening for prostate cancer and to better understand the causes and burden of this cancer type. Overdiagnosis – the diagnosis of a tumour that would not otherwise progress to cause symptoms or death in an individual’s lifetime – is thought to be a serious concern in managing prostate cancer. For example, a recent IARC-led study contrasted the large heterogeneity of the trends in incidence of prostate cancer and the more uniform decrease in mortality from prostate cancer in Europe in 1980–2017. The large variation in the trends in incidence paralleled the temporal variations in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing. These findings are compatible with substantial overdiagnosis associated with opportunistic PSA testing and underscore the need for carefully designed screening programmes that minimize unnecessary diagnoses and overtreatment.

Through projects such as the Prostate Cancer Awareness and Initiative for Screening in the European Union (PRAISE-U) project, Co-creating and Evaluating a Context-adapted Risk-stratified Population-based Prostate Cancer Screening Pilot in Slovenia (Pro-Screen Slovenia), and Improving Cancer Screening in Slovenia (ICSIS), IARC and partner institutions are working on organized risk-stratified screening for prostate cancer, which may integrate PSA testing, risk stratification, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided biopsy decisions. These stratified approaches could decrease the number of men who are unnecessarily diagnosed with prostate cancer and reduce the associated problems of overtreatment.

This work is part of IARC’s wider involvement in European Union and international cancer screening policy and improving early detection of breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, prostate, and gastric cancer.

Read the PRAISE-U project protocol

Read “Mapping the readiness landscape for prostate cancer screening in Europe: analysis of health system capacity across the PRAISE-U pilots” in eClinicalMedicine

Read “Prostate cancer incidence and mortality in Europe and implications for screening activities: population-based study” in BMJ

Read about the launch of the ICSIS project 

Read more about the IARC study suggesting that overdiagnosis is driving increases in prostate cancer incidence in Europe

Explore other IARC research related to prostate cancer