Former Prime Minister David Cameron reveals he was diagnosed with prostate cancer after his wife encouraged him to get a test

Lord David Cameron has revealed that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer after his wife insisted he go to a GP for a check-up.

The former Prime Minister, 59, said Samantha told him to get tested after hearing about Soho House founder Nick Jones’ battle with the disease on the radio earlier this year.

Lord Cameron said his prostate specific antigen (PSA) test came back worryingly high before his biopsy confirmed the presence of the disease.

He told The Times: ‘You’ve got an MRI scan with a few black dots on it. “Oh, that’s probably okay,” you think. But what if the biopsy comes back and says you have prostate cancer?

‘You are always afraid to hear these words. And then it’s literally coming out of the doctor’s mouth and you think: “Oh, no, he’s going to say it. He’s going to say it. Oh my God, he said it.” Then came the next decision. Are you receiving treatment? Or will you watch and wait?’

The politician has now called for screening to be made available to men most at risk of the disease.

‘I want to go out too. “I would like to add my name to the long list of people calling for a targeted screening program,” he said.

Lord Cameron’s wife Samantha Cameron wants her husband to be examined by a GP

Lord Cameron said he decided to go for focal therapy and had another MRI scan after treatment which showed the method was successful.

Focal therapy uses needles to deliver electrical pulses to destroy cancerous cells and is considered less invasive than radiotherapy or prostatectomy.

It comes amid news that the NHS’s first screening program for prostate cancer could be given the green light this week; This represents a game-changing opportunity to save thousands of lives.

On Thursday, the government’s National Screening Committee (NSC) will meet to take a decision that could revolutionize early diagnosis and treatment.

The country’s leading oncologists, economists and medical ethicists are expected to issue a recommendation on whether widespread screening should be done to catch the disease earlier.

But it will likely only be approved for people at highest risk, such as those with a family history or certain genes.

Prostate cancer is the most common form of the disease in men, with around 63,000 diagnoses and 12,000 deaths in the UK each year.

The Daily Mail has long campaigned for a national screening program similar to that for breast, bowel and cervical cancer.

Daily Mail is campaigning to end needless prostate cancer deaths and called for a national screening program to be launched

The former Prime Minister said he was told to get checked by his wife earlier this year after hearing on the radio about Soho House founder Nick Jones’ battle with the disease.

The call was backed by Olympic cyclist great Sir Chris Hoy, who was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer in September 2023.

The NHS currently uses PSA (prostate specific antigen) blood tests and MRI scans to check for the disease.

There have previously been concerns that screening could lead to overdiagnosis; but advances in technology now mean this is less of a problem.

Major research has found that prostate cancer screening reduces the risk of death from the disease by 13 per cent, leading to a ‘sustained’ decline in deaths over several decades.

Researchers from the University Medical Center Rotterdam discovered that one death in every 456 men invited for PSA tests was prevented.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team said their study ‘highlights the need for a more targeted strategy’.

Lord Cameron served as the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016.