Reasons for helping us reach our goal of £2,000,000

Reasons for Helping

• Cancer can affect anyone, and most people have someone close to them who has experienced it.  Statistics show that cancer will affect 1 in 3 people.

• Cancer is not a single disease - in fact even cancers of the same type can behave very differently in different patients.

• The outcome depends on the type of cancer, how far it has spread and how well the cancer responds to treatment.

• Many cancers can be cured - such as childhood cancers, testicular cancer, prostate cancer in men and some skin cancers.  We want to spread this success to other types of cancer.  Also chemotherapy can reduce the chances of more common cancers like breast cancer and bowel cancer from coming back after an operation.  We want to increase the chances of this happening too.

• Treatment is getting better - some cancers that commonly killed patients 20 years ago are now curable.

• We can now test cancers to find out which treatment is appropriate to individual cases.  This needs a sophisticated laboratory to replace existing facilities hence the reason for this appeal.

• Time is short - any donation you can make will be of great benefit to many people.

What is Cancer?

Every tissue in the body is made up of cells, which grow and replace those that are used up every day.  Cancer is the term we use to describe an abnormal growth of cells within any tissue or organ.  Normally, cell growth is controlled by a very large number (thousands) of genes within the DNA of the cell.  When some of these genes are damaged and stop working, cells may start to grow out of control.  However, which genes are damaged varies between individuals, even if they have the same type of cancer.  The result is an uncontrolled growth of cells.  Once this growth becomes big enough, it forms a cancerous tumour and starts to interfere with the function of the affected tissue.  Cancer may also spread to other tissues, which can make treatment extremely difficult.

What Treatment is Available?

Cancer patients often see lots of different specialists all of whom contribute to their care.  Suspecting something is wrong is the first step - most cancers grow slowly and may not become obvious for many years.  Early detection helps and this is why there are now screening programmes for several common cancer types (e.g. breast cancer).  Some cancers can be detected before they even become tumours, and can be treated at that stage.

Screening

A good example of screening is cervical cancer.  In some countries, this is the commonest form of women's cancer, and it used to be common here too.  Now it is much less common, thanks to the cervical cytology screening programme, which detects around 95% of those at risk and allows early treatment.  This screening programme relies on healthy women having smear tests at regular intervals.  As most cervical cancers grow slowly, screening tests can be used to pick up the presence of a cancer at an early stage so reducing the risk of it spreading.  Screening for other cancers is becoming possible, but tends to use even more sophisticated (and expensive) methods than the cervical cancer programme.

Registered Charity: 1047986