GETTING older has many advantages but it also brings the potential for life changing illness, and the elderly attract the attention of the NHS. Since reaching 60 I’ve received regular bowel cancer screening packs, and recently received an invite for Abdominal Aortic Aneurism Screening. There’s no routine screening for prostate cancer and that’s the disease that found me. Having gone through a variety of treatments I now appear to be in the clear, but it concerns me that men of a certain age are not called for a routine PSA test.

Prostate cancer now kills more men in this country, 11,819 in the year to February 2018, than breast cancer kills women.

Although not perfect the PSA test is all we have to determine whether or not a man is likely to have, or already has, prostate cancer.

Early onset, and the aggressive form of the disease, are particularly worrying so if you’re a man of 50 something, or know a man of 50 something, who hasn’t had a PSA test and it concerns you, perhaps it would be worth talking to your GP about it. Based on the assumption that ‘only the good die young’ I should be fine for a few years yet.

Paul Snow

Victoria Place

Portland