Doctors should stop calling early prostate changes 'cancer'

Doctors should stop calling early changes to the prostate 'cancer' to unburden patients, experts suggest.

Low-grade prostate cancer, commonly known as GG1 among physicians, often does not spread or causes symptoms.

As such, researchers questioned if it should be renamed 'incidentaloma' to better reflect its severity.

They suggest this could remove some of the 'psychological burden of a cancer diagnosis for patients'.

Researchers from universities including Harvard and the University of California met with participants from multiple fields, including patient advocacy.

They concluded that while common among older men, such changes should not be considered normal with concerns removing the word 'cancer' could lead men to be less vigilant in monitoring any progression.

Writing in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, lead researcher Matthew Cooperberg, from UC San Francisco, said the word 'cancer' was synonymous with death.

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He said: 'We are now finding exceptionally common cellular changes in the prostate that in some cases presage development of aggressive cancer but in most do not.

'We absolutely need to monitor these abnormalities no matter what we label them, but patients should not be burdened with a cancer diagnosis if what we see has zero capacity to spread or to kill.'

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men and second most deadly, responsible for around 12,000 deaths a year in the UK.

Improvements to the diagnosis of prostate cancer such as MRIs and targeted biopsies means men are suffering fewer harms than previously, strengthening calls for a national screening programme.

Prostate Cancer UK said these improvements means men with a slow-growing cancer can feel confident in active surveillance, such as regular scans and blood tests to check for any disease progression.

Amy Rylance, assistant director of health improvement, said there were arguments 'for and against' its reclassification.

She said: 'It might help to reduce anxiety, but in a cash-strapped NHS it could also mean that surveillance gets deprioritised - both by men and the system - increasing the risk that if the cancer did progress, it could be missed.

'The good news is that UK data shows that over 95 per cent of men diagnosed with these very low risk cancers chose active surveillance, avoiding unnecessary treatments.'