Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the UK. Each year more than 41,500 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer – more than 110 people every day in the UK. It is the second most common cause of cancer death after lung cancer in the UK*.
Bowel cancer is one of the most curable cancers if detected early. Five-year survival rates for bowel cancer have doubled over the last 30 years, thanks to greater awareness and earlier detection of the disease, and improving treatment.
With optimal treatment and surgery, more cures are possible with bowel cancer than with all the other internal cancers added together.
However too many people, 6 in 10 patients, still die from bowel cancer its liver metastases. There is more that has to be done to make bowel cancer treatment more precise and more patients suitable for curative surgery for liver metastases.
Patients diagnosed with early disease are nearly twice as likely to survive and therefore we have to encourage more screening and treatment for early disease.
Watch an interview with Professor Bill Heald CBE talking about bowel cancer surgery.
*Statistics provided by Cancer Research UK
