More than 180,000 people in the UK have waited an excessive amount of time for cancer support, including tests and treatments, over the last decade. 

According to analysis from charity Macmillan Cancer Support, the government’s failure to meet targets has put hundreds of thousands of people’s lives at risk. 

Chief executive officer at the organisation Gemma Peters stated: “Cancer care is in crisis after years of governments failing to act.”

She added: “Every single person who has faced a worse outcome from their cancer diagnosis because of delays will know the devastating impact that waiting has had on their lives.”

For some, this includes learning their cancer has become incurable due to the delays, which Ms Peters describes as being “categorically unacceptable and entirely avoidable”. 

Macmillan Cancer Support’s new campaign called “What Are We Waiting For?” is calling for the government to speed up cancer diagnosis and treatment, after revealing failures to meet waiting time targets and to support NHS cancer services. 

The findings also reported that more than 100,000 people have had to face their cancer progressing due to the delays over the last ten years, or have been left with fewer options when it comes to their treatments. 

The charity now wants the government to increase funding to deliver integrated care, provide local NHS services with more money, create additional jobs, such as care coordinators, and invest in preventive and rehabilitative measures. 

It hopes additional finance will ensure “everyone, everywhere gets the potentially life-saving cancer care they desperately need, on time”. 

This comes after April 2023’s Cancer Waiting Times data for England was published. It revealed nearly 50,000 people in April alone waited over a fortnight to see a specialist after being given an urgent GP referral.

This represents the lowest performance for its two-week referral target for six months. 

What’s more, over 5,000 people with cancer in England had to wait more than two months to begin their treatment. This is worse than the previous month and performance was lower than in 2021 and early 2022. 

In fact, all cancer waiting targets in England failed to be met in April, and performance in each area was worse than the preceding month. 

At the same time, the NHS reported the number of people with cancer who are still waiting for treatment after two months following their urgent referral rose to over 3,000 for the last three weeks of April. 

Minesh Patel, head of policy at Macmillan Cancer Support, commented on the data, saying the public is continuing to be “let down by a system that simply cannot cope”. 

He noted that thousands of people have to face long delays for both their diagnosis and treatment, which not only causes lots of anxiety to the patients and the families, but puts their lives at risk. 

To avoid having to wait weeks for a diagnosis, people who have suspicious symptoms should book a Sheffield oncology appointment as soon as possible to find out what they are dealing with.

With advances in private oncology and more widespread screening programmes, more people are being tested for cancer than ever before, people are being diagnosed earlier and their chances of survival are significantly higher.

According to a long-term study published by the British Medical Journal, the risk of death within five years of being diagnosed with breast cancer has reduced by over two-thirds over the past 20 years, from 14.4 per cent to 4.9 per cent.

Moreover, for the vast majority of people who are diagnosed early and thus have a relatively low-grade HER2-negative tumour, that chance plummets to just 0.2 per cent, providing hope for so many more women who have been diagnosed.

The paper is the first long-term cancer study of its type that has an extended follow-up period, and is not only positive news in its own right, but can be used as an accurate tool for cancer prognosis.

Here are just some of the reasons why people diagnosed with cancer are living longer lives and are more likely to live longer.

 

Wider Breast Screening Programmes

The paper compares survival rates from 1993 to 1998 and from 2010 to 2015 in terms of survival rates after five years, and in that intervening time, a lot has changed in the world of oncology, but arguably the biggest shift is in more proactive approaches to screening and greater education of the signs of cancer.

The earlier a cancerous lesion or tumour is discovered, the easier it is to treat and the greater the long-term outcomes, so a wider screening programme will allow more people to start treatment earlier and be cancer-free as a result.

 

Improved Radiotherapy Treatments

Radiotherapy has been an option for people with cancer for decades, but advances in both technology and methodological approaches have meant that there are far more effective treatments which can be undertaken with fewer side effects.

Treatments such as intrabeam radiotherapy, which uses low-energy radiation to directly target a tumour bed during breast cancer surgery, are highly effective and provide greater options for patients.

Not only are these treatments more effective but they are also more widely available for patients, ensuring they can receive potentially lifesaving or life-prolonging treatment when previously it was not an option.

 

Greater Range Of Cancer Drugs

Besides a greater range of chemotherapy drugs that can help remove any traces of cancer from the body, there are also a wider variety of medical treatments available, including targeted therapies that can fundamentally stop cancer cells from spreading and growing.

In 1993, few target therapies were known of, even fewer were available and none had been approved for use on the NHS at that point until the more widespread approval of imatinib in the early 2000s.

Whilst not every type of cancer can currently be treated through targeted therapy, each year brings with it a greater array of cancer treatments and with that a renewed hope that more people with breast cancer can have as broad a range of treatment options as possible.

Receiving a cancer diagnosis can be incredibly upsetting and difficult to deal with, however, there are many treatment options and pathways which can help you to manage and treat the disease.

Focussing on your mental health throughout this can help to ensure you are in a good headspace and can help you to develop coping mechanisms which can assist in navigating the challenges that come with your cancer journey.

Strength and resilience are important in helping you to remain positive and hopeful throughout your treatment and can also help to maintain some normalcy in your life throughout the process.

One of the best ways to maintain your emotional wellbeing is to surround yourself with a positive support system. Whether this is family and friends or a network you build through support groups, having people around you to provide emotional support can be a huge help.

It is also very useful to talk to people who are going through or have been through similar experiences as it can put your own journey and experiences into perspective and allow you to gain a different outlook on your diagnosis.

Being open, honest and expressing your thoughts and feelings instead of bottling them up is also crucial for your emotional well-being. Those around you are there to listen and communication can give you the validation and strength to better cope with your anxieties and fears.

Remember to practise self-care. Spend time doing activities which bring you joy and happiness. This can be a great distraction and also helps you to maintain structure and normalcy which can aid in ensuring you are relaxed and calm.

Spending time caring for your mental health can also help to reduce stress. Dealing with cancer can be stressful and this can take a toll on both your mental and physical health, so any way to alleviate this will be beneficial for you.

Looking for a private oncology clinic? Get in touch with us today.

Diagnosis and treatment of cancer can be a difficult and scary time and there are many areas of uncertainty which can make it even harder to cope.

With any medical condition, the terminology used by doctors can sometimes make it even harder to understand what is going on which can make it more unsettling. Medical terminology will be used whether you receive treatment from the NHS or through a private oncologist.

However, there are many common terms which are easy to understand which can make your treatment journey a bit easier. These words are often used by medical professionals who may sometimes assume you already know their meaning and may not elaborate unless you ask.

One common term used when diagnosing and treating cancer is malignant. This is just another word for cancerous and will be used when discussing the cancer cells, where they are and where they are spreading.

Although malignant may sound like a scary medical term, it is just used interchangeably with cancer or cancerous and therefore if a medical professional uses this term during your treatment, it isn’t cause for additional concern or worry.

Benign, on the other hand, is a term used when describing a tumour, growth or cells which are not cancerous. Again, this word might sound confusing or scary, but it is actually quite the opposite and shows an absence of cancerous cells.

Metastatic is used when referring to the spread of cancer. This is usually used when discussing stage 4 cancer and is used to describe cancerous cells which have spread, or metastasised.

This may also be referred to as secondary cancer. This term is used if cancer has spread from where it started to another area of the body. For example, if a cancerous growth begins in the breast and moves into the lymph nodes, this would be known as secondary cancer.

Primary cancer, therefore, refers to where the cancer originally started. Regardless of where cancer spreads to or how far travels it will usually still be referred to by the place it was first found.

Prognosis is a term used across the medical field for a range of issues which simply refers to the likely course or outcome of a condition and its treatment. This includes how it will progress, develop and how the treatment is likely to work out.

The grade of cancer is a scale used to determine the speed of growth of cancerous cells. This ranges from one to three, one being cancerous cells which look normal and aren’t growing or multiplying rapidly, three being cancerous cells which appear abnormal and are fast spreading.

The grade should not be confused with the stage when referring to cancer as they have entirely different meanings and could cause confusion.

The stage refers to the size of the cancer and how far it has spread, regardless of how fast it has done so. This is described on a scale from zero to four, zero being cancer which hasn’t spread at all, four being cancer which is metastatic cancer and has spread to other areas.

There are many effective cancer treatments that can make a huge difference to your life, either by extending it or defeating your cancer outright. But the world of cancer research never stands still and potential new treatments are emerging all the time.

Among these is a new development emerging from the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR). It has announced the successful creation by its scientists of a new compound that can break down cancer-causing proteins.

Described by the ICR as a “molecular glue-type degrader”, the compound has the potential to be developed into a cancer drug that could neutralise the proteins that cause cancers like B-cell lymphoma.

The work focused on the fact that cells have their own natural system for disposing of cells that cause disease. However, this system does not always have the compounds it needs to fight against all proteins, in particular some that can cause cancer.

What this project did was see the creation of just such a compound that selectively sticks to a protein known as BCL6, which is essential for B-cell lymphoma cells to survive. The protein works by binding to DNA and regulating the genes that cause cells to divide or die; so by inhibiting it, the causal sequence that enables cancer to develop can be halted or at least slowed down.

Having already discovered some compounds that could inhibit BCL6 proteins, the researchers found that some they had created could go further and actually degrade them. Experiments in mice showed this could greatly slow the development of tumours.

While the effects were modest, researchers said they did indicate that this compound plus other inhibitor drugs could be very effective as a therapy against B-cell lymphoma.

Head of chemistry at the IR Professor Swen Hoelder said: “I’m pleased to announce the discovery of our new molecular glue-type degrader of BCL6 in this new study, which is also a great example of creative science in a cutting-edge, innovative field in cancer drug discovery.”

As well as potentially leading to the development of anti-cancer drugs, the discovery could also help increase understanding of the biology of BCL6 proteins, which may help with the development of other treatments.

The studies, partly funded by Cancer Research UK, were published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

As ever with this kind of development, more research may be needed and work undertaken to trial new drugs that are developed, especially in human trials to show that the promising results revealed by animal experimentation can be replicated in homo sapiens.

The ICR has achieved a number of breakthroughs in its research into cancer of various forms, leading to new treatments.

For example, its research in the area of bladder cancer found that providing radiotherapy and chemotherapy simultaneously was effective in preventing the cancer from returning and had fewer side-effects than other treatments.

Another of its studies in this field found that fewer but larger doses of radiotherapy was more effective in treating this form of cancer and preventing it from coming back.