Prostate cancer: Compelling reason behind prostate cancer name change push

Doctors should stop describing early changes to the prostate as ‘cancer’ to ease the minds of 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 to potentially remove some of the ‘psychological burden of a cancer diagnosis for patients’.

University researchers met with participants from multiple fields, concluding that while common among older men, such changes should not be considered ‘normal’ – with concerns that removing the word ‘cancer’ could cause men to be less vigilant.

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

He added: ‘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, but patients should not be burdened with a cancer diagnosis if what we see has zero capacity to spread or to kill.’

However, Amy Rylance, assistant director of health improvement at Prostate Cancer UK, argued: ‘In a cash-strapped NHS, it could mean surveillance gets deprioritised.’

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among British men, causing about 12,000 deaths every year.