Prostate cancer now kills more people in the UK than breast cancer. But medical advances promise to curb deaths across the board – we just need to know our enemy. MH spoke to those at the cutting edge of cancer research to ensure you’re armed with the latest facts
I AM JACK’S PROSTATE GLAND.
I sit around his urethra, just below his bladder. If I’m in good shape, I’ll be a little bigger than a walnut. I produce an alkaline fluid that is about a third of what makes up his semen, and my muscles help him to ejaculate. One day, if Jack lives long enough, I will get cancer. And it could kill us both.
But will it? Let’s examine the facts. Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer for men in the UK, but it does discriminate. Our risk is higher if our father or brother has had it. Black men are more at risk than white men, with a one-in-four chance compared to one in eight, and Asian men have the lowest risk, at one in 13. Obesity can put you in further danger. Whether or not a man develops prostate cancer also depends on how long he lives. There’s plenty of other stuff that can kill us first – heart disease, for example. We’re also not at much risk until our fifties, though it can strike sooner.
Here’s the good news. For those who do develop prostate cancer, it’s no longer an automatic death sentence. Far from it. More than 85% of those diagnosed will survive it (or, to phrase it somewhat less positively, be killed by something else first). In the 1970s, only a quarter of men diagnosed lived beyond 10 years.
Now, with increased screening, men are being diagnosed younger and with less severe symptoms. Not too long ago, if you were over the age of 70, you wouldn’t necessarily be treated at all, because another ailment was likely to get to you first – but this has changed, too. A fit man of 70 today has a fair chance of living another 15 years, and someone with a nasty cancer at 75 can do just as well as a 65-year-old with the same condition.
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