More than one third of UK cancer patients discovered they had the disease after they attended accident and emergency in pain or with severe symptoms.
According to The Times:
Experts at University College London looked at data from nearly one million cancer patients in six countries, finding that 37 per cent in England and Wales, and 38 per cent in Scotland were diagnosed only in an emergency.
Patients diagnosed after attending A&E were twice as likely to die over the next 12 months compared with people diagnosed at other times.
The study found that a higher proportion of patients were diagnosed in an emergency in Britain than in other comparable countries including Australia and Canada.
The alarming figures highlight the importance of improving early detection of cancer through better awareness of symptoms among GPs and quicker access to diagnostic tests.
The study, published in The Lancet Oncology, was based on data from 2012 to 2017 but Cancer Research UK warned the situation is likely to have worsened due to Covid.
Some 326,000 fewer people in England received an urgent referral from a GP to a specialist for suspected cancer during the first year of the pandemic.
Cancer screening programmes were also halted, while many patients said difficulties seeing a GP meant they were only diagnosed after going to A&E.
The UCL study, which looked at eight different types of cancer, found almost half of liver cancer cases in Britain were only diagnosed after patients attended A&E.
Cancers with vague symptoms, such as pancreatic, liver, lung and ovarian, were most likely to be diagnosed in an emergency, as were cases in people over the age of 75.
