Black People One-Third Less Likely To Get Cancer Diagnosis By Screening

Black people are more than a third less likely than white people to be diagnosed with cancer via screening in England, according to the first study of its kind, prompting calls for targeted efforts to boost uptake of such programmes.

- Andrew Gregory

Cancer screening programmes save lives by preventing the disease occurring or spotting it earlier, when treatment is more likely to be effective.

In England, screening for cervical cancer is offered to women aged 25 to 64, breast cancer screening to women aged 50 to 70, and everyone aged 60 to 74 is offered a bowel cancer screening home test kit every two years.

But new research lays bare for the first time stark disparities in screening diagnosis rates between different ethnic groups. The study of more than 240,000 cancer patients in England over a decade found that overall, 8.6% of patients were diagnosed with the disease via screening.

Broken down by ethnicity, while 8.3% of white patients were diagnosed with cancer via screening, just 5.1% of black people were diagnosed that way - making them 38% less likely to be diagnosed via screening.