• Question: How would you diagnose cancer fast and safely? and what are the tell tale symptoms of cancer

    Asked by anon-331186 on 29 Jun 2022.
    • Photo: Sophie Richardson

      Sophie Richardson answered on 21 Jun 2022:

      Symptoms of cancer tend to vary, depending on what type of cancer we’re talking about. For example, one symptom people are told to look for in breast cancer is an unusual lump in the breast tissue/armpit area. However, symptoms don’t always happen early in the cancer. Sometimes, symptoms appear in the late stages of cancer, when it can be too late to treat it.

      At the moment, there is a massive trial going on in the NHS to see if we can use a blood test to detect cancer early (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58544874). This would be a great way of detecting cancer early, quickly and with a simple blood test that people can get at their GP. However, it is early on in the testing of this technology, but the preliminary results do look promising!

    • Photo: Karin Purshouse

      Karin Purshouse answered on 22 Jun 2022:

      As Sophie says, in the future, we might be able to use blood tests.

      But for now, it really depends on where the cancer is. Some are easy to spot because they cause visible changes like a lump somewhere, or the change in a mole on your skin. Some cause your bowel patterns to change (like blood in your poo or in your urine) or a new cough.

      More general cancer symptoms are many and varied, and include fatigue, low energy, unusual back pain. These unfortunately are more common when a cancer is more advanced, although not always. Also some cancers don’t happen in places where they cause symptoms in the early stages. Pancreatic cancer is tricky like that, because it might cause jaundice or abdominal pains, but it might already have grown quite a lot.

      The NHS has lots of screening programmes for common cancers to try and find cancers as early as possible – so at the moment we have screening for bowel, breast, cervical cancers. These are aimed at finding cancers, or even pre-cancer changes, so early that they can be treated curatively.

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