Know the signs – and help beat cancer

Cancer is no longer the taboo subject it once was thanks to constant breakthroughs in medical research that have led to thousands surviving it.

But with these medical advances, it’s even more vital to catch the disease early and to do that you need to know what signs to look out for.

March is both Prostate and Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month and the aim for 2016 is to make everyone aware of the key symptoms of these two diseases.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer affecting men with 44,000 new cases each year. It’s often slow growing, particularly in older men.

Key symptoms include a need to urgently pass urine, having difficulty in passing urine and a need to pass urine more frequently especially at night.

Just because you have these symptoms doesn’t mean you have cancer, as men’s prostate glands get larger as they grow older anyhow, but it makes sense to get it checked out.

For women, ovarian cancer is one of the most common cancers with seven thousand new cases each year. It can be a very aggressive cancer so catching it early is vitally important.

The key symptom to be on the look-out for is regular and persistent bloating most days for over three weeks. By regular and persistent we mean more than 12 times in a month.

Sometimes this symptom is mistaken for irritable bowel syndrome but if you’re experiencing this for the first time, particularly if you’re over 50, get to see your GP.

Also don’t be fooled into thinking that your smear test would have detected if you had ovarian cancer because it cannot check for this.

Remember your GP won’t think you’re wasting their time – you know your body best of all so get checked out if you think there may be something wrong.