New test to slash time for prostate diagnosis
Men with prostate cancer ‘still dying of embarrassment’ Daily Mail, February 5
A ‘ONE-STOP’ service to revolutionise prostate cancer treatment has been launched by the health service. The quick-access programme slashes the time taken for a diagnosis from around six weeks to just days.
Patients have all their tests in one day, rather than several. And doctors use the latest MRI scanners and techniques to search for the disease with far greater accuracy than before.
Doctors hope to test 5,000 men south of the Border over the next two years in the £1.6million trial. Campaigners say it is the biggest leap forward in prostate cancer diagnosis for decades.
‘Our target waiting times have considerably reduced,’ said Hashim Ahmed, the consultant surgeon in charge of the programme. ‘We are diagnosing men quickly and they are then being treated quickly. They don’t have to come back on multiple visits. We are biopsying fewer patients – and yet we are catching more aggressive cancers.’ Figures released last month show prostate cancer has now become a bigger killer in England than breast cancer. Care has improved since the Daily Mail began campaigning for better treatment in 1999 but the advances have been slow compared with other diseases.
The new service means that four in ten patients will be given the all-clear within four hours of walking into hospital and the remainder will get their results within a few more days.
Quick diagnosis can be the difference between life and death: 98 per cent of those who are diagnosed early survive for more than five years. This figure drops to 36 per cent for those diagnosed late.
Professor Ahmed, who is based at Imperial College London, said that detection of aggressive cancers increased from 23 per cent to 31 per cent. And a safer biopsy technique reduced rates of infections that can prove fatal.
So far 400 men have been treated as part of the Rapid programme, which was launched at Imperial College’s Charing Cross hospital in west London in September.
Professor Ahmed believes the approach could form the basis for setting up a national screening programme. He said: ‘Fast access to high-quality prostate MRI allows many men to avoid invasive biopsies as well as allowing precision biopsy in those men requiring it to find high-risk tumours much earlier.’
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said: ‘The potential benefit to men with suspected cancer is significant.’
Early results show that men are diagnosed in an average of 17 days after referral from GP – compared with a national average of 56 days. For patients who need a biopsy the procedure is much more accurate. Doctors use an MRI scan overlaid against live ultrasound images to take samples from suspicious tissue rather than choosing random locations.
Fewer samples need to be taken, reducing infection rates from 6 per cent to 0.5 per cent. Cases of potentially deadly sepsis fell from around 1 per cent to virtually none.
Heather Blake of Prostate Cancer UK said: ‘Improvements to diagnosis are crucial if we are to save more lives from prostate cancer. The benefits of having a multiparametric MRI scan before a biopsy represent the biggest leap forward in prostate cancer diagnosis for decades.’
She said the Rapid system would make ‘diagnosis quicker, easier and more efficient’.
Owen Sharp, of the Movember Foundation for prostate cancer, said: ‘It is great news that this pilot offers the opportunity for men to get faster diagnosis with a reduced risk of complications.’