Screening - Cancer Research UK - Science Update blog

Cancer care in the new NHS in England

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Emlyn Samuel

Changes are afoot in the NHS – what will they mean for cancer patients?

As of Monday (1^st April) the Government’s reform of the NHS became a reality, with the Health and Social Care Act coming into force.

We’ve blogged a number of times about our views on the reforms as they took shape over the last couple of years, and more recently about our report on the state of cancer services during transition to the new system.

But now that the reforms are actually in place, and more of the detail has emerged, we thought we would take this opportunity to look at how the new NHS will work for cancer patients.

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Gene variations and cancer risk – more results, more answers and more questions

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Kat Arney

Scientists have found around eighty new gene variations linked to breast, prostate and ovarian cancers

A thousand scientists from one hundred international research groups working over four years. Thirteen papers spread across five journals. DNA analysis of two hundred thousand people. And eighty new genetic variations, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) linked to three different types of cancer, doubling the current total known about so far.

These are impressive, big figures from an equally impressive, big piece of science, which Cancer Research UK helped to fund (here’s the press release). But what does it all mean?

To find out, we spoke to Professor Doug Easton from the University of Cambridge, one of the leaders of the project.

Cancer Research UK: What exactly are SNPs?

Prof Easton: SNP stands for “single nucleotide polymorphism”, and it’s a single ‘letter’ difference in the DNA between individuals. Your DNA is made up of around 3 billion of these ‘letters’ – there are four possible letters you can have: A, C, T and G – so a SNP is just a single place in your genome where you might have one particular letter, and someone else has a different one.

To explain a bit more about SNPs and what they do, have a look at this short animation:

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News digest – Budget, bowel screening, Bluetooth, kids smoking and more

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Emma Smith

Read our news digest

The big news this week was the Budget – Chancellor George Osborne set out the government’s spending priorities for the forthcoming year. Here’s our reaction, plus a nice post from the Institute of Cancer Research looking at the implications for science funding.
Shocking new figures reveal that nearly 570 children start smoking for the first time every single day, according to the Daily Telegraph. This is why our campaign for standardized packaging is so important – it’s giving kids one less reason to start smoking.
The first invitations for a new form of bowel screening, known as Bowel Scope Screening, were sent out in England. This is great news as the test can both spot bowel cancer early and even prevent some people ever developing the disease, potentially saving thousands of lives.

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New bowel screening test introduced in England

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Dan Hughes-Morgan

A new addition to the bowel screening programme is being rolled out

Back in December we wrote about Jeremy Hunt’s announcement that six centres in England would start using Bowel Scope Screening (BSS, also known as flexi-scope or flexible sigmoidoscopy) as part of their bowel screening programme in 2013.

This week, 55 year olds in the South of Tyne region (which includes Gateshead, Sunderland and South Tyneside) received the first wave of letters inviting them to be screened.

This is great news. Cancer Research UK has been involved in Bowel Scope Screening from the beginning – we co-funded a 16 year study which showed that it cuts deaths by over 40 per cent, and – unlike the current test – can actually prevent a third of bowel cancers among those screened.

As a result, it has the potential to save thousands of lives from bowel cancer each year.

As soon as the trial results were published in 2010, we said we wanted the Government to add BSS to the existing bowel screening programme, and later that year, they agreed, setting aside £60m to fund it.

Since then we’ve been calling for Bowel Scope Screening to start as soon as possible, so it’s fantastic to see it finally happen.

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Notes from the NCRI conference (day 3)

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Henry Scowcroft

It was another day of fascinating talks

It’s been another packed day at the NCRI conference, full of interesting discussion and debate (as were yesterday’s and Sunday’s sessions).

But before we get stuck into the day’s events, it’s worth flagging the overnight media coverage from the meeting, with OnMedica covering this story on prostate screening, while the BBC was one of several news outlets to cover a promising potential method to detect cancer.

And now to the main event.

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How can we improve the breast cancer screening programme?

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Henry Scowcroft

Breast screening is back in the headlines

Breast screening is back in the news.

At the request of the Government and Cancer Research UK, an independent expert panel has scrutinised all the available evidence on the pros and cons of mammography. And this morning they’ve published their findings in The Lancet, putting these into context for the first time.

The panel’s findings are more complicated than you might think, so we’ve produced a detailed Q&A setting out the findings and what they mean, as well as an infographic and a video.

A key finding is that breast screening has significant downsides, as well as undoubted benefits: in addition to the 1,300 lives saved each year, the panel acknowledged that around 4,000 women are ‘overdiagnosed’ by the programme.

Overdiagnosis is a complicated concept – these are genuine cancers spotted by the screening programme (and which wouldn’t have been detected otherwise), which would have grown so slowly they would never caused problems during a woman’s life.

And since there’s absolutely no way to tell the difference between these slow-growing cancers and those that are life-threatening, virtually all women diagnosed through screening are treated – usually with surgery, and potentially with hormone treatment, radiotherapy and – occasionally – chemotherapy.

The concept of ‘harmless’ cancers is likely to be new to many. And the fact that one in five cancers diagnosed by the screening programme wouldn’t have caused harm if left alone is certainly likely to cause concern.

Watch a video about the breast screening review on YouTube

Watch a video about the breast screening review (click to open a new window)

As well as overdiagnosis, screening has other downsides. About four out of five women called back for more tests, turn out not to have cancer. These false alarms cause anxiety, while some women need a biopsy to rule out cancer, and this can be painful.

And the X-rays used to carry out breast screening are linked to a very small number of cancers every year.

But on balance, because of the fact that it saves so many lives, we think breast screening should continue, and we recommend that women to go for screening when invited.

So, now that we better understand the harms breast screening can cause, what are researchers doing to minimise them?

Three key questions, if properly answered, could make a big difference: firstly, who to screen, secondly, what to screen them with, and finally, what to do with cancers when they’re found.

Thankfully the answers to these crucial questions are already being sketched out in labs and hospitals around the world. So let’s tentatively peer into the future and see what breast screening may look like in a decade’s time.

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Is the healthcare system failing elderly people with cancer symptoms?

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Oliver Childs

A new report published today - and widely covered in the media – raises difficult questions about how cancers are diagnosed in elderly people in England. The findings are stark – almost 1 in 3 cancers in the over 70s (31 per cent) are diagnosed through an emergency hospital admission, rather than through other routes (such as being referred by their GP).

That’s almost twice the proportion of people under 70 who are diagnosed through an emergency hospital admission (17 per cent).

To put that in perspective, around 58,400 people a year in England are diagnosed with cancer through an emergency hospital admission, sometimes because their symptoms become so severe that they go straight to hospital themselves, or because they’re sent there by their GP. Of these, 38,300 are men and women over the age of 70.

Cancers diagnosed through emergency admission to hospital

This is worrying – people are much less likely to live beyond 12 months after they’ve been diagnosed through an emergency hospital admission. Clearly something in our healthcare set-up isn’t right if so many people, particularly older men and women, are slipping through the net and being diagnosed in an emergency.

So we urgently need to understand why such a high proportion of the elderly have an emergency diagnosis. After all, our population isn’t getting any younger, and this means more cancers are on the horizon.

This problem won’t go away unless something is changed in the healthcare system. The question is, what?

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