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His wife urged him to get a test after they listened to a podcast
Former Prime Minister David Cameron was diagnosed with cancer, he has revealed. The former Conservative leader has said he had hoped for the best when tests showed something which needed further investigation but doctors then confirmed he had cancer.
In an interview with The Times, he explained how a year ago, he and wife Samantha were listening to the radio when he heard an interview with Nick Jones, the founder of the Soho House empire, explaining how in 2022 he had had a prostate test.
It had picked up his cancer and he had treated it, but he was urging others to get tested.
Samantha Cameron told her 59-year-old husband to ask his GP at his upcoming health check-up to test him.
After listening to the interview, the former Conservative MP went and had a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, which looks for proteins associated with prostate cancer which came out high.
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“You always hope for the best,” he says. When you sit there, at each stage in the diagnostic process, you run the probabilities. “You have a high PSA score — that’s probably nothing.
“You have an MRI scan with a few black marks on it. You think, ‘Ah, that’s probably OK.’ But when the biopsy comes back, and it says you have got prostate 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.’”.
He said he has gone public because he wants there to be more discussion about prostate cancer and how he thinks there should be a targeted screening programme.
Chris Hoy, the former Olympic cyclist was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, and Nick Jones calling for a screening programme.
“I don’t particularly like discussing my personal intimate health issues, but I feel I ought to,” he says. “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.”
His older brother Alexander had died, at the same age Cameron is now, of pancreatic cancer too, he explains in the interview.
He told The Times that he has had a “focal” therapy using needles to deliver electric pulses to destroy the cancerous cells rather than a prostatectomy or radiotherapy.
After that another MRI scan show that it had worked. “When you see the picture of the bits you need to get rid of, and the bits that are still OK that you don’t? That was a big relief. That was a great moment,” he said.
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