A third of UK cancer patients diagnosed as emergencies

More than a third of cancers in the UK are discovered after patients are rushed to hospital, one of the highest rates in comparable high-income countries, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, funded by Cancer Research UK and cancer societies in participating countries, found also that countries with higher incidences of these emergency presentations had poorer survival rates for patients. Published in The Lancet Oncology , the study analysed more than 850,000 cancer cases between 2012 and 2017 in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Norway and the UK. It compared data on a range of different cancers, how they were discovered and their outcomes. Patients' cancers were discovered in emergency situations 37% of the time in England, 37.4 percent of the time in Wales and 38.5%of the time in Scotland. Patients in Northern Ireland, where a different accounting procedure was used, had a 27.9 % rate of emergency presentations. Across the countries studied, only New Zealand had a higher rate of emergency discoveries at 42.5 percent than the UK.