Last year it was Joe Biden and Barnaby Joyce who made public their diagnoses of prostate cancer. Before them, came other household names battling this condition – from Ben Stiller to Rod Stewart.
This admission, on Jeremy Clarkson’s own TV show for his need of surgery, rewrote the script as it showed a change in who this disease is affecting, and how.
Prostate Cancer is no longer purely a disease of healthy young men for whom the need for treatment was obvious, or of much older men where the treatment side effects are an unpleasant but probably tolerable price to pay for a degree of cancer control until you died of something else.
Jeremy Clarkson’s situation exemplifies the increasing prevalence of prostate cancer in countries where the median life expectancy of men now exceeds 85 years, and the relevance of disease awareness even in someone with other known medical issues.
After the last season of his series was interrupted due to an incipient heart attack, we now come to appreciate that Clarkson’s heart is working as well as ever after cardiac stents were placed.
Now that he is not going to die anytime soon, the progression of his prostate cancer to a more aggressive form threatens to shorten his life in a way that would not have been likely before contemporary health care was widespread.
During the time when treatment of his previously low grade prostate cancer was on hold to permit his heart issues to be appropriately prioritised, we now learn that his cancer became aggressive enough to demand treatment rather than observation.
Despite the progression, the cancer remains curable, a situation that would have been unlikely years ago but is now reflective of how far our standards of care have come.
Clarkson has clearly had the optimal treatment which the best medical systems in the world like Australia’s aim to provide, but the lessons for all men are clear.
A man will die in Australia from prostate cancer approximately every two hours. But most prostate cancers can be managed without intervention for prolonged periods of time, and even if they should become more aggressive over time, they are usually curable at the time this change is detected.
This standard of management is available to all men in Australia via a Medicare system that provides for practice equivalent to the world’s best.
Despite the looks of shock from Clarkson’s co-workers on his farm we can likely look forward to multiple seasons of his show in years to come, with no deviation from the established plot line due to his prostate cancer
These conditions are often now managed concurrently, with little impact on regular life, and in doing so Australian men on average live longer than those from most other countries in the world.
Not ignoring the possibility of prostate cancer is the key to not dying from it. As Jeremy Clarkson demonstrates, men don’t have to drive the world’s most expensive cars to enjoy the long life ahead of them provided their medical issues are identified sooner rather than later.
Author Bio
Professor Damien M Bolton is President of the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand and Director of Urology at Austin Health. He is Professor of Surgery at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the Victorian Urologic Oncology Group of the Cancer Council. His academic urological practice focuses on urologic oncology, with a leadership role in cancer research, registrar training, and as a national and regional reference service for minimally invasive treatment of urological cancers.
