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Which screening, at which age, in which country
The 26 organised screening programmes in the Nordic and Baltic countries in one table: the age each one starts, how often it repeats, how the invitation reaches you and what the test is actually like.
This page describes screening programmes; it is not a diagnosis, not a personal risk assessment and not a substitute for your own health service. Age bands are set nationally and change — the invitation you receive, and the body named on your country page, outrank anything written here. Screening is for people without symptoms: a new lump, blood you can see, a mole that has changed, unexplained weight loss or a sudden change in vision or hearing needs a clinician now, whatever a recent screening result said.
What counts as screening
Screening is testing people who feel perfectly well, in the hope of finding something before it announces itself. That is a completely different activity from testing someone with a symptom, and it is judged by a different standard: a test that is excellent for investigating a lump can be a poor screening test, because in a population of well people almost every positive result will be a false alarm. An organised programme goes further still. It has a register that knows who exists and how old they are, a rule that says who is due, a channel that reaches them, a defined pathway for everyone who tests positive, and published figures on how it is performing. Everything else — the check you asked for, the panel a private clinic sells, the test a colleague recommended — is opportunistic testing, which is not the same thing and is not what the tables below describe.
Across the Nordic and Baltic countries the organised programmes are almost entirely about cancer, with one exception: Sweden’s abdominal aortic scan for 65-year-old men. Everything else on this site that looks like screening — blood pressure, hearing, eyes, bones, teeth — happens without an invitation, which is a large part of why it happens late.
Every programme in the region, in one table
Read down for your country and across for the programme. Each cell is the age band and the interval; where a country runs two bands for the same programme, both are shown. "Ask your GP" means the check is funded but nobody writes to you about it.
| Country | Breast | Cervical | Bowel | Prostate | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Estonia | 50–74, every 2 years | 30–65, every 5 years | 56–68, every 2 years | — | — |
| Finland | 50–69, every 2 years | 30–65, every 5 years | 60–72, every 2 years | — | — |
| Latvia | 50–68, every 2 years | 25–29, every 3 years 30–70, every 5 years | 50–74, every year (ask your GP) | 50–75, every 2 years (ask your GP) | — |
| Lithuania | 45–74, every 2 years (ask your GP) | 25–59, every 3 years (ask your GP) | 50–74, every 2 years (ask your GP) | 50–69, every 2 years (ask your GP) | — |
| Sweden | 40–74, every 2 years | 23–70, interval lengthens with age | 60–74, every 2 years | — | Abdominal aortic aneurysm scan: at 65, once |
| Norway | 50–69, every 2 years | 25–69, every 5 years | at 55, once | — | — |
| Denmark | 50–69, every 2 years | 23–49, every 3 years 50–64, every 5 years | 50–74, every 2 years | — | — |
Two things in that table are worth pausing on. Sweden starts mammography a full decade earlier than most of its neighbours, and Sweden is also the only country here that has assessed PSA screening and formally decided not to offer it while Latvia and Lithuania fund it. Neither is a mistake. They are different value judgements made from the same trials, and the page on what screening can and cannot do explains why the evidence genuinely allows both.
Your own timeline
Every programme in the region is built on birth years rather than birthdays, so the honest answer to "when am I due?" is a calendar year. Put a birth year in and the table fills in with the years ahead; the calendar file turns them into all-day reminders you can keep.
Your own timeline
Enter a birth year and the table below fills in with every invitation that country expects to send you, and the calendar year each one is due. Nothing is sent anywhere — the whole calculation happens in this page.
JavaScript is off, so the timeline is not calculated here. The age ladders on each country page below are the same information rendered on the server — find your age and read across.
The calendar file contains one all-day reminder per invitation, in the month you were born, for the years still ahead. It is a prompt to expect a letter, not the letter itself.
The tests themselves
What the appointment involves, what the test finds, what it misses and what a positive result actually means. These pages are the same wherever you live; only the age band on the country page changes.
Breast cancer screening (mammography)
An X-ray of each breast, read by two radiologists, repeated every two years across a band of ages that starts at 40 in Sweden and 50 almost everywhere else. What it finds, what it misses and what a call-back means.
Cervical screening (HPV test)
Almost every country in the region has switched from looking for abnormal cells to looking for the virus that causes them. The test is better, so the gap between tests is longer — and in several countries you can now take the sample yourself.
Bowel cancer screening (stool test)
A sample from one bowel movement, taken at home and posted. It is the only screening programme in the region that routinely prevents cancers rather than only finding them early — because the follow-up removes the polyp.
Prostate screening (PSA)
Latvia and Lithuania fund PSA testing for men in their fifties and sixties. Sweden assessed the same evidence and recommends against an organised programme. Here is what the trials actually found.
Lung cancer screening (low-dose CT)
The trials are positive and the European recommendation asks countries to build programmes stepwise. In this region it is still pilots rather than invitations — but the eligibility rule is worth knowing.
Abdominal aortic aneurysm scan
The only non-cancer screening programme in the region. Sweden offers men a single abdominal ultrasound in the year they turn 65, looking for a silent widening of the main artery.
Newborn blood spot (heel prick)
A few drops of blood from a baby’s heel at two to five days old, dried on a card, screened for a couple of dozen rare conditions that are treatable if caught before symptoms start.
Newborn hearing screening
A soft probe in a sleeping baby’s ear, a few minutes, no discomfort. It exists because hearing loss found in the first months has a completely different outcome from hearing loss found at three.
Screening in pregnancy
An early dating scan, a chromosome screening test, and a detailed anomaly scan around twenty weeks. All of it is offered rather than required, and understanding what each one answers is what makes the choice a real one.
Child and school health checks
Between the newborn examination and adulthood a child is measured, weighed, sight-tested, hearing-tested and checked for scoliosis a dozen times. It is a screening programme; it just does not look like one.
Eye checks and glaucoma
No country in the region invites adults for an eye test. That matters because glaucoma destroys peripheral vision silently, and the vision you have already lost to it does not come back.
Adult hearing checks
There is no invitation for adult hearing, and people wait about a decade between first noticing a problem and doing something. The consequences of that delay are larger than most people assume.
Bone density and fracture risk
Nobody is invited for a DXA scan. The route in is a fracture risk score, and the single most reliable trigger is a bone broken from a fall that should not have broken anything.
Blood pressure and cardiovascular risk
No cancer programme prevents as many deaths as finding and treating high blood pressure. There is rarely an invitation for it — but it is a five-minute measurement and most countries fund the check.
Diabetes and prediabetes checks
Type 2 diabetes is typically present for years before it is diagnosed. There is no invitation programme, but there is a well-validated Finnish risk questionnaire that decides who needs the blood test.
Dental check-ups
The interval between check-ups should follow your risk, not a habit. Children are covered by public programmes across the region; adults mostly are not, and that shows in the statistics.
Skin and mole checks
No country in this region invites anyone for a skin check. What replaces it is knowing which change in a mole is worth an appointment — and that new or changing beats ugly.
One page per country
Who organises the programmes, how the invitation reaches you, what it costs, and the full age ladder rendered age by age.
Estonia
Estonia runs three organised cancer screening programmes. The target group is rebuilt every year from birth years, the invitation arrives as state e-mail or a paper letter, and it is free whether or not you have health insurance.
Finland
Finnish screening is written into a government decree and delivered by the wellbeing services counties. Breast and cervical screening are long established; bowel screening is being phased in birth cohort by birth cohort until 2031.
Latvia
Latvia splits its screening in two. Breast and cervical checks arrive as a personal invitation letter from the National Health Service; the bowel and prostate checks are state-funded but you ask your family doctor for them.
Lithuania
Lithuania runs five funded prevention programmes and delivers all of them through the family doctor rather than by invitation letter. Breast screening was widened to 45–74 at the start of 2025.
Sweden
Sweden decides screening centrally and delivers it regionally. It has the widest mammography band in the region, an aortic scan for 65-year-old men, and an explicit national decision not to offer PSA screening.
Norway
Norway runs its screening from the Cancer Registry: mammography from 50, HPV testing from 25, and a bowel programme that invites everyone in the year they turn 55.
Denmark
Denmark invites by Digital Post rather than paper. Breast screening runs 50–69, cervical screening 23–64 with a longer interval after 50, and bowel screening 50–74.
Screening itself
How screening invitations actually work
Every organised programme is a register, a rule and a letter. Knowing which of the three failed is usually enough to fix it — and in half the region there is no letter at all.
What screening can and cannot do
Screening has real benefits and real harms, and the harms are the reason well-informed countries reach different answers from the same trials. Four ideas explain almost every disagreement.
When the result is not normal
A positive screening test is a sorting decision, not a diagnosis. Knowing the shape of the pathway ahead of time removes most of the fear from the days of waiting.
Where these figures come from
Every age band on this surface is written down once, in a single table, and each country page names the national body that publishes it. The European frame is the Council Recommendation of 9 December 2022 on cancer screening, which replaced the 2003 recommendation and widened the suggested breast band, moved cervical screening onto HPV testing, and asked member states to develop lung, prostate and — in high-incidence regions — gastric screening through piloting rather than immediate rollout. National programmes deviate from it in both directions, deliberately.
Bands change, usually by a year or two at a time and usually with a transition period. Anything here that disagrees with the letter in your hand or the page on your own health service’s site should be assumed wrong, and the country pages link straight to those bodies.
Sources: Council Recommendation of 9 December 2022 on cancer screening (CELEX 32022H1213(01)) · Council Recommendation of 2 December 2003 on cancer screening (CELEX 32003H0878) · Socialstyrelsen — national screening programmes · European Cancer Information System, European Commission Joint Research Centre · checked 2026-09-07
Related on this site
- Health report — turning your own tracked numbers into something a clinician can read in a minute. Screening is the calendar; that is the record.
- Blood test reference — what an individual result on a laboratory report actually means.
- Blood pressure and blood glucose — the two measurements from the cardiovascular page, in detail.
- Age by age — one page per age, of which the screening due that decade is only a part.
Perguntas frequentes
At what age does breast cancer screening start?
It depends on the country. Sweden invites women from 40, Lithuania from 45, and Estonia, Finland, Norway, Latvia and Denmark from 50. The 2022 European Council Recommendation names 50 to 69 as the core band and suggests 45 to 74 as a wider one, which is why the national answers differ.
Why has my cervical screening interval got longer?
Because the test changed. Almost every country in the region has moved from examining cells to testing for high-risk HPV, and a negative virus test rules out risk for much longer than a negative cell sample did. Five years from age 30 is now the standard interval.
I never receive screening invitations — why?
In Lithuania there are none: every prevention programme runs through the family doctor and you have to ask. Elsewhere the usual cause is an out-of-date address in the population register, or an invitation sitting in a digital mailbox you rarely open.
Is screening compulsory?
Nowhere in this region. Every programme is offered and can be declined, and declining has no effect on any other care you receive. You can usually ask to be removed from the invitation list and later ask to be put back on it.
Does a normal screening result mean I am fine?
It means nothing was found on that day by that test. Cancers that appear between two rounds exist in every programme and are counted as a quality measure, so a new symptom needs assessment on its own merits whatever a recent result said.
Which screening saves the most lives?
Across a whole population, finding and treating high blood pressure prevents more early deaths than any cancer programme — and it is a five-minute measurement that almost nobody is invited for. Bowel screening is the cancer programme that can actually prevent the disease, because the follow-up colonoscopy removes the polyp.
Keep the dates and the numbers in one place
TempoLife is a free health tracker for the ordinary record — weight, sleep, blood pressure, the note about what the doctor said. The screening letter arrives every few years; the rest of it happens daily.