Early diagnosis
Early diagnosis
Historically, if a person were to be diagnosed with cancer there was little hope of recovery. Today, major advances in detection, treatment and supportive care mean that for many people, the disease is now treatable. For others, where curative options are not yet available, doctors are able to manage symptoms more effectively, meaning their cancer becomes a long-term condition that people live with for many years. There are over 200 different types of cancer, ranging from those with cure rates of nearly 100 per cent, to those with less fortunate outcomes.
One in two people in the UK will get cancer in their lifetime,1 so there is huge scope for pharmacy professionals to play an active part in identifying patients with potential symptoms and help them to access treatment as soon as possible.
Early diagnosis of cancer is key to improving survival rates. Patients who are diagnosed early (stages 1 and 2) have the best chance of curative treatment and long-term survival.2 For example:
Bowel cancer
In England, more than nine in 10 bowel cancer patients survive the disease for five years or more, if diagnosed at the earliest stage3
Breast cancer
Almost all women diagnosed with breast cancer at the earliest stage survive their disease for at least five years.3
Understanding health inequalities
People from lower socioeconomic groups have worse survival outcomes for cancer, which, in part, reflects later-stage disease at diagnosis.4 There is evidence that poor knowledge of certain cancer symptoms, fearful and fatalistic beliefs about cancer, and emotional barriers (such as worrying about what the doctor might find) combine to delay symptom presentation among lower socioeconomic groups5
Barriers to communication make accessing any kind of healthcare difficult. For example, people who are deaf have been shown to experience delayed cancer diagnosis.6 This may be due to difficulty in accessing written language and lack of use of sign language translation in public health campaigns, leading to low awareness of cancer symptoms. Deaf people may have difficulty in communicating with healthcare professionals (and vice versa), and timely access to interpreters for those who need them is often a problem.
Prostate cancer affects one in four men from black African, Caribbean and black British communities, compared to one in eight men from other communities. Black men are also at risk from the age of 45 rather than 50 years old, as in other men. If they have symptoms, black men are less likely to act on them and visit their doctor.7 Pharmacy professionals need to be aware of this and consider how it might affect the advice and support they offer and their threshold for referral.