London, December 01: Nearly 10,000 cancer patients needlessly die every year in Britain due to of late diagnosis, an official report has said.
The figure is double the earlier estimate of 5,000 fatalities, according to the report by the government’s director of cancer services.
Professor Mike Richards, who prepared the report, revised the estimate after studying the three deadliest forms of the disease — lung, bowel and breast cancer — that together kill almost 63,000 people a year in UK, The Guardian reported.
Early detection of symptoms can save between 5,000 and 10,000 lives every year, the report said.
Richards analysed one-year survival rates for the three cancers in England and compared them with those in other European countries in the late 1990s.
He found that “late diagnosis was almost certainly a major contributor to poor survival in England for all three cancers” and that about half of all the deaths could have been avoided if diagnosis was as good as the best-performing European countries.
Low rates of surgical intervention being received by cancer patients was another key reason for poor survival rates in the UK.
“These delays in patients presenting with symptoms and cancer being diagnosed at a late stage inevitably cost lives. The situation is unacceptable,” Richards said.
–PTI