Study predicts overall economic cost of cancer, heart disease, dementia and stroke will rise by 61%

The cost of England’s four biggest killer diseases could rise to £86bn a year by 2050, prompting calls for a crackdown on alcohol, junk food and smoking.

The ageing population means the annual cost of cancer, heart disease, dementia and stroke combined will go from the £51.9bn recorded in 2018 to £85.6bn in 2050 – a rise of 61%.

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I’m sure they’ll be tricky, given how much I struggled with lateral flow tests. But anything beats having to involve another human being

DIY smear tests for women in England may be imminent, after a pilot scheme produced promising results . In London, 27,000 undertested or untested women were offered a DIY kit by their GP or were sent one by post; 56% of the first group did the test and 13% of the second, presumably picking up women who would otherwise not have been tested for all sorts of reasons, from trauma to lack of time. The researchers from King’s College London estimate that, if this was replicated throughout England, more than 1 million more people could be tested over a three-year cycle. That’s brilliant – rightly heralded a “gamechanger”.

I thought all the cervix-owners of my acquaintance would be overjoyed at this news, but there were a surprising number of reservations. One friend interrogated the practicalities: “How could you take a sample cleanly from the right place, jabbing blindly in the undergrowth? Maybe it’s a two-person job and you have to direct your significant other: ‘Fold flap A into slot B, Richard. No, not like that.’”

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There are no health benefits to tanning beds: they don’t help you produce vitamin D and are no substitute for proper medical treatments for skin conditions

My response to people telling me they’ve been “for a quick sunbed” is, I imagine, similar to the reaction one might get from Chris Packham for admitting to going on a quick foxhunt. I loathe the things and believe they should be banned here (as they are in Australia, Brazil and Iran).

I assumed commercial sunbeds were becoming déclassé, but a new survey commissioned by tanning brand Vita Liberata for its campaign Not the Way to Glow has shown there’s still a mountain to climb.

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Research suggests at-home tests could encourage 400,000 more women a year to have a screening

Women could be offered DIY cervical screening tests on the NHS, after research found self-testing at home significantly improved screening rates.

Researchers calculated that being able to take their sample at home could encourage about 400,000 more women a year to have a cervical screening.

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Movember says British men have worse health than comparable countries and suffer stark regional inequalities

More than 133,000 men die early every year in the UK, equating to 15 every hour, according to a report calling for urgent action to improve men’s health.

Two in five men are dying prematurely, before the age of 75 and often from entirely avoidable health conditions, research by the charity Movember found.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie . In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org , or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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Hope for new treatments after researchers find spread of disease is aided by shutting down of molecules in key genes

Scientists have made a crucial DNA discovery that could help cure one of the deadliest cancers.

A team of researchers from the UK and US have found that pancreatic cancer is able to shut down molecules in one of the body’s most important genes, helping the disease to grow and spread rapidly.

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Cancer doctors know better than anyone how you can give yourself the best possible chance of avoiding a disease that one in two of us will get. Here, they share the tips that they live by

Despite the fact that one in two people will get cancer, many of us are ill informed about what we can do to prevent it. How do oncologists live their lives based on what they know? Doctors share the secrets of living healthily and the risks worth taking – or not.

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Artificial intelligence is heralded as helping the NHS fight cancer. But some warn it’s a distraction from more urgent challenges

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What if AI isn’t that great? What if we’ve been overstating its potential to a frankly dangerous degree? That’s the concern of leading cancer experts in the NHS, who warn that the health service is obsessing over new tech to the point that it’s putting patient safety at risk. From our story yesterday :

In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that ‘novel solutions’ such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as ‘magic bullets’ for the cancer crisis, but ‘none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem’.

A ‘common fallacy’ of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create ‘additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy’.

AI is a workflow tool, but actually, is it going to improve survival? Well, we’ve got limited evidence of that so far. Yes, it’s something that could potentially help the workforce, but you still need people to take a patient’s history, to take blood, to do surgery, to break bad news.

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