Former British PM David Cameron reveals cancer diagnosis

Former British prime minister David Cameron has revealed he has been diagnosed with and treated for prostate cancer after being urged to take a test by his wife, Samantha, last year.

Speaking to The Times, Cameron, 59, explained how his wife initially urged him to seek a check via his GP after both Camerons heard a radio interview in which Soho House founder Nick Jones told of how a test detected his own prostate cancer.

After taking a prostate-specific antigen test (PSA), which looks for proteins associated with prostate cancer, Cameron said his results came back worryingly high, and a biopsy eventually confirmed cancer.

“You have an MRI scan with a few black marks on it. You think, ‘Ah, that’s probably OK,’ Cameron told The Times. But when a doctor had confirmed he had cancer, “you always dread hearing those words. And then literally as they’re coming out of the doctor’s mouth, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, no, he’s going to say it. He’s going to say it. Oh God, he said it.’”

Cameron said he then faced a decision to watch and wait to determine how fast his cancer was growing, or potentially undergo treatment, which can have serious side effects such as erectile dysfunction and incontinence.

He told The Times he was aware that his older brother, Alexander, had died at the same age of pancreatic cancer, which, he said, “focuses the mind”.

Cameron said he decided to move ahead with treatment, and eventually opted for a less intrusive “focal” therapy, which uses electric pulses delivered by needles to eliminate cancerous cells.

He said he was now backing a call by the British charity Prostate Cancer to offer all high-risk older men screening for a disease which kills about 12,000 men a year in the UK.

According to the Cancer Council, more than 26,000 cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in Australia last year, making it the most common cancer in men, aside from skin cancer. About one in 12 men will get prostate cancer by the age of 70, and one in five will get it in their lifetime.

“I don’t particularly like discussing my personal intimate health issues, but I feel I ought to,” Cameron said. “Let’s be honest. Men are not very good at talking about their health. We tend to put things off.

“We’re embarrassed to talk about something like the prostate because it’s so intricately connected with sexual health and everything else. I sort of thought, well, this has happened to you, and you should lend your voice to it.”

The British National Screening Committee has rejected previous screening program proposals over concerns about the reliability of PSA tests, meaning some men could face unnecessary and potentially harmful treatment.

But Cameron said he believed recent technological advances have made a screening program more viable. The committee is expected to make recommendations on the issue to the government later this month, the London Telegraph reported.

Cameron became Conservative leader in 2005 and, in 2010, prime minister at the head of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He led his party to outright victory at the 2015 general election, but resigned a year later, the morning after Britain voted to leave the European Union.

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