Middlesbrough man with prostate cancer welcomes new screening trial
Prostate Cancer UK has announced details today to help save lives
A Teesside man with prostate cancer is welcoming a new screening trial which aims to double the number of lives saved.
Prostate Cancer UK has today announced details to find the best way to screen men, as it is currently the most common cancer in the UK without a screening programme, instead relying on men coming forward to their GP to request a test.
Now, the charity is raising awareness of TRANSFORM, the new trial that will test multiple methods of screening, and compare these against how men are tested now, to find the safest, most accurate way to screen men.
Terry Bytheway is from Middlesbrough and was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2017. He said: "Cancer groups have been pushing for some sort of screening and so far it's been unsuccessful, and the reason being that the main screening type is called PSA which is a blood test. Unfortunately it's not always accurate as it can give a false high or a false low.
"The more men we can actually screen the more chance we actually have of catching men early in their journey, and then actually curing them because once it becomes metastatic, like mine has, it gets into the bones and the body and then it becomes uncurable and it's terminal. I mean that's what I was told seven years ago and I'm still here fighting.
"One in eight men will develop some form of prostate issue in their life. Now it's not always prostate cancer, it could be quite common in the older man of an enlargement of the prostate and that can cause similiar things to prostate cancer itself.
"With the PSA not being as accurate as we would want it to be, a lot of GPs would actually refuse your blood test based on that process, but that's not helping us to identify who has prostate cancer or even a prostate issue.
"It's a silent killer. All cancers are. But the important thing is trying to identify exactly who has an issue. If you have any sort of issue; if you're going to the toilet a little more often than normal, particularly during a night time, when you have an issue with the prostate the prostate puts pressure on the bladder, and the other thing is if you see any signs at all of blood then get that checked out immediately."
Prostate Cancer UK says previous trials using PSA and biopsy to screen for prostate cancer have shown that it is possible to prevent between 8% and 20% of prostate cancer deaths depending on how regularly men are screened.
However, the charity adds that the new £42 million trial aims to refine the process and could more than double this impact and reduce prostate cancer deaths by up to 40%. With over 12,000 prostate cancer deaths in the UK alone this could mean thousands of men saved each year in the UK, and many thousands more worldwide.
TRANSFORM has been backed by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and Movember, who together committed £17.5million towards the trial.
Six of the worldâs top prostate cancer researchers will lead the team taking on TRANSFORM, the biggest prostate cancer screening trial for 20 years, with hopes to see its first results in as little as three years.
The massive scale of the trial will enable the team to create a bio bank of samples, images and data at a scale never seen before in prostate cancer. This will be available to all kinds of cancer researchers and is predicted to spur a wave of new discoveries and provide a platform to prove the accuracy of the next generation of diagnostics.
One in eight men in the UK will get prostate cancer - on average more than 52,000 men are diagnosed every year, thatâs 143 men every day.