Correction to: British Journal of Cancer (2018) 118, 750–759; https://doi.org/10.1038/bjc.2017.463, published online 30 January 2018. Since the publication of this paper, the authors have identified an error in the code they used in Stata to compute the Wells risk score for men. With the correct code, the performance of the Wells risk score is improved. The correct values are included in the updated versions of Table 3, Fig. 1 (Fig. 1A), Fig. 2 (Fig. 2A) and Supplementary Table 3 provided here.