Introduction: Raising awareness and promoting early diagnosis
Amanda Ramirez
Guys, Kings and St Thomas School of Medicine, London, UK
Patients with cancer in the UK tend to present with more advanced disease and have poorer survival than their European counterparts. Furthermore, within this country there is strong evidence that people in socio-economically deprived groups have poorer survival than those in more affluent groups. There is increasing evidence that this, too, is linked to presenting with more advanced disease. This is almost certainly due to a combination of late presentation by some patients and delays in onward referral by some GPs. The predominant risk factor for patient delays across common cancers is lack of awareness that the symptoms could be due to cancer. We will examine evidence for levels of cancer awareness amongst the UK population and novel approaches to raising cancer awareness and early presentation in this session.
