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3 months, 1 week ago

Alcohol use and dementia

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  • Dementia has emerged as one of the biggest killer diseases of the 21st century
  • Studies suggest that moderate alcohol use significantly increases the risk of dementia
  • There are no treatments that slow or stop the progression of dementia
  • There are 50m people worldwide living with dementia, by 2050 there will be 132m
  • 0.85m people in the UK are living with dementia and this is expected to rise to 1m by 2025
  • Public policies alone are not sufficient to limit and control alcohol use
  • This increases the importance of a medical solution for dementia
  • Recent innovative research on neurodegenerative disorders provide some hope for future dementia sufferers
 
Alcohol use and dementia

Two significant recent studies described in this Commentary link alcohol use and the onset of dementia. One study published in the June 2017 edition of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) suggests that moderate alcohol use increases the risk of adverse brain outcomes and a steeper decline in cognitive abilities. The other, published in the February 2018 edition of the Lancet Public Health, suggests that excessive alcohol consumption is a significant risk of early onset dementia.

Dementia is a chronic progressive disorder, which has emerged as one of the biggest killers and the only leading cause of death without a treatment that can slow or stop its progression. Of the 529,655 deaths recorded in the UK in 2015, dementia accounted for 61,686 (11.6%): the majority are women, 41,283, compared to 20,403 men.
 
In this Commentary
 
In this Commentary we outline how alcohol affects you, explain its misuse and describe some of the UK’s drinking patterns and their consequent costs. We then suggest that public policies alone, which are aimed at both the individual and population levels to reduce and control alcohol use in order to save lives and reduce healthcare costs, are insufficient. This shifts the burden of a solution for alcohol related dementia onto potential medical treatments. We describe dementia and provide a few epidemiological facts before describing the findings of the 2 studies. We suggest that the studies are significant because there are no effective treatments or cures for dementia despite the vast amounts of money spent on neurodegenerative diseases over the past 2 decades. We end by mentioning a couple of significant UK-based innovative dementia research initiatives, which signal hope for future dementia sufferers.
 
How alcohol affects you and its misuse

Alcohol is a dependence-producing psychoactive beverage, which has been widely used throughout the world for centuries. Problems associated with the consumption of alcohol have been around since the beginning of recorded history. There are 3 mechanisms by which alcohol can affect you: (i) alcohol has toxic effects on your brain and other organs and tissue, (ii) alcohol has intoxicating effects, which manifest themselves in physical and mental impairment and (iii) you may become dependent of alcohol, which means control over your drinking habit is impaired. Alcohol’s harmful impact is influenced by, (i) the volume you consume, (ii) your pattern of drinking and (iii) the quality of the alcohol. When your body takes in more alcohol than it can metabolize, the excess builds up in your bloodstream. Your heart circulates the blood alcohol throughout your body leading to changes in your body’s chemistry and normal functions. 

Studies have consistently suggested that heavy alcohol consumption is detrimental to health and a leading preventable cause of death. There is an increasing awareness of the harmful impact of alcohol misuse on individuals and societies. According to the 2011 World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global status report on alcohol and health, only about 50% of the world's population consumes alcohol, and most users are in the wealthier northern hemisphere countries, although alcohol use is increasingly becoming a problem in emerging economies. Eastern European countries have the highest consumption, riskiest patterns of drinking and the highest levels of alcohol-related deaths and disabilities. According to a February 2018 WHO report, an estimated 3.3m people a year worldwide die as a result of alcohol misuse, which accounts for about as much death and disability worldwide as tobacco and hypertension. 
 
Drinking in the UK and its costs
 
The latest available data suggest that the total alcohol consumption in the UK is 9.5 litres per person aged 15 years and older and 7.8 litres per person on average throughout the entire population in 2015. This forms part of a recent downward trend from a peak of 11.6 and 9.5 litres per head respectively in 2004 and positions the UK 16th out of the 34 OEDC countries. 21m people in the UK do not drink alcohol. According to NHS Digital, in 2014 there were 1.1m hospital admissions in England wholly or partially attributable to alcohol use: more than double the number recorded a decade earlier. In 2014 about 6,600 people in England died from causes related to alcohol and about 115,000 adults received specialist alcohol treatment. Treating alcohol related conditions is estimated to cost NHS England about £3.5bn per year: around 3.6% of its annual budget. About 6% of adults in England are dependent on alcohol. 195,000 prescriptions were written in 2014 by the NHS to treat alcohol dependence at a cost of £3.4m. Over the past decade these prescription costs, measured in 2014 prices, have increased by nearly 80% from £1.9m in 2004.
 
Public policies to curb alcohol use are insufficient

In May 2018, Scotland became the first country in the world to introduce legislation for minimum pricing on cheap, high-strength alcohol. The government said it was an endeavour to cut the consumption of alcohol and save lives. For several decades, similar alcohol reduction and prevention measures have been available at both the individual and population levels in the UK and elsewhere. The most effective include alcohol taxes, restrictions on alcohol availability, and drink-driving countermeasures. Despite the success of these policies, alcohol problems continue to present a major challenge to medicine and public health. In part, this is because population-based public health alcohol control policies tend to be overlooked in favour of approaches aimed at the individual and these have tended to be more palliative than preventative. It is reasonable to assume therefore that, in the near- to medium-term, alcohol related dementia will neither be significantly slowed nor reduced by public policies alone. This shifts the emphasis to a medical solution for alcohol related dementia.
 
Dementia

Dementia is an umbrella term, which describes a group of symptoms that impair your cognitive functions and behavioural abilities severely enough to interfere with your daily life and activities. It is a chronic, progressive and incurable disorder, which ranges in severity from ‘mild’, when it is just beginning to affect your functioning, to ‘severe’, when you depend completely on others for basic activities of living. Dementia involves damage of nerve cells in your brain, which can occur in several areas and affect people differently, depending on the area of the brain affected. Alzheimer's, a neurodegenerative disease, is the most common irreversible cause of dementia, accounting for 60% to 80% of all dementia cases.
The biggest risk factor for dementia is age. We are living in the age of the aged, which represents the successes of improved healthcare over the past century. There are some 50m people worldwide living with dementia. The total number of people with dementia worldwide is projected to increase to 75m by 2030 and 132m by 2050, with the largest proportion of these in low- and middle-income countries. There are 0.85m people diagnosed with dementia in the UK, with numbers set to rise to over 1m by 2025 and to 2m by 2050. 225,000 people in Britain will develop dementia this year. There is a similar story to be told in most wealthy developed countries. For example, in the US an estimated 6m people have Alzheimer's, which equates to 10% of people aged 65 and older. The current annual cost of dementia globally is estimated to be about US$1tr: 1% of global GDP. The annual cost of the condition in the US is US$259bn, which is expected to rise to US$1tr by 2025. Dementia costs the UK exchequer about £26bn each year.
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Dementia is not an inevitable part of ageing. The notion that dementia is a disease rather than a side-effect of aging has been around for 100 years. Early onset of the disease can begin when people are in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. For example, over 42,000 people under 65 have dementia in the UK. Age, family histories and heredity are factors of dementia that we cannot change. But lifestyle factors such as alcohol use are modifiable risks. There is no cure for the condition and no therapy that slows or stops its progression although some drug treatments may temporarily improve its symptoms.
 
The BMJ study

For some time, scientists have suggested that moderate alcohol consumption could delay the onset of cognitive impairments in ageing, but few studies have examined the effects of modest consumption of alcohol on the brain. This increases the significance on the BMJ study, which includes an analysis of the relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and dementia. Researchers from Oxford University  and University College London studied a cohort of 550 healthy adult civil servants over a 30 year period between 1985 and 2015. At the beginning of the study the average age of the cohort was 43 and none were dependent on alcohol. At regular intervals during the study tests were administered to assess participants’ levels of alcohol consumption and cognition. At the end of the study participants underwent an MRI brain scan, which enabled researchers to analyse correlations between average alcohol consumption, cognition and brain structure. Findings suggest that alcohol use is associated with reduced right hippocampal volume. The hippocampus is a small region of your brain associated with memory and spatial navigation. Poor memory is linked with small hippocampal volume as measured by an MRI scan. The more you drink, the more you are likely to have hippocampal atrophy, which is regarded as an early marker for dementia. Significantly, the study found that even moderate drinkers were 3 times more likely to have hippocampal atrophy than abstainers.

The principal strength of the study is that it is a longitudinal observational analysis of a specific cohort, which yielded detailed information on long term alcohol consumption and cognition and confounding variables. These are “extra” variables, which are important to know in order to avoid bias. Because this was an observational study the researchers were unable to draw any conclusions on cause and effect. Notwithstanding, they were able to conclude that moderate alcohol use is associated with adverse brain outcomes and, “Alcohol might represent a modifiable risk factor for cognitive impairment, and primary prevention interventions targeted to later life could be too late.” In an editorial note in the same BMJ, Killian Welch, a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital suggests the findings of the study, “strengthen the argument that drinking habits many people regard as normal, have adverse consequences for health.”
 
The Lancet Public Health study
 
The second study from The Lancet Public Health presents findings of a large retrospective study predicated upon data of more than 1m adults diagnosed with dementia between 2008-2013 from the French National Hospital Discharge database. These data provide details on all hospital admissions, including patient demographics, reasons and durations for hospital stays and treatments received. Findings suggest that being hospitalised with alcohol dependence or a health issue caused by continuous heavy drinking is a significant risk factor for dementia. Although the condition is more common in people over the age of 65, the study identified and examined 57,000 cases, which presented with the onset of dementia before 65. Of these, 57% were heavy drinkers, 39% regularly consumed alcohol and 18% had an alcohol use disorder as an additional diagnosis. “Heavy drinkers” were found to be more than 3 times likelier to develop dementia. Excluding alcohol-related brain damage, alcohol use disorders were still found to be associated with a 2 times greater risk of dementia.

According to Michael Schwarzinger, the lead author of the study, who is the director of the French Translational Health Economics Network and a researcher at the Universite Paris Diderot, France, “Chronic heavy drinking was the most important modifiable risk factor for dementia onset in both genders and remained so after controlling for all known risk factors for dementia onset.” While other studies have reached similar conclusions, some research suggest that drinking one or two units of alcohol a day - a small glass of red wine particularly - could be of benefit to brain health and slow the onset cognitive deterioration. Indeed, the Lancet Commission on dementia, associates light to moderate alcohol use with a healthier brain. Schwarzinger and his colleagues however are clear, “Our findings suggest the burden of dementia attributable to alcohol use disorders is much larger than previously thought . . .. Chronic heavy drinking leads to irreversible brain damage [and even] heavy drinkers who got sober didn’t have a lower dementia risk than their peers who remained problem drinkers. . . Additionally, clinicians should be better aware of the role of alcohol use disorders in dementia onset over the lifetime, which seems to be a risk factor often omitted.”
 
Why there is no cure for dementia

Over the past 2 decades pharmaceutical companies, biotech’s, governments, universities and charities have devoted vast amounts of money, time and effort to the dementia challenge, but without being able to develop any credible treatment let alone cure. This partly reflects the complexity of neurodegenerative disorders. The brain is a complex organ, which scientists are still endeavouring to understand. This lack of understanding is one of the main obstacles preventing the development of effective treatments for dementia. The disorder seems to present as a result of an intricate interaction of genes, lifestyle factors and other environmental influences. But, without knowing the exact mechanisms that cause damage, especially in Alzheimer's, it is impossible to target the disease process effectively.

In addition to our rudimentary understanding of the brain there are some specific challenges faced by researchers into neurodegenerative disorders. One is the blood-brain barrier, which is formed by brain endothelial cells, which protect the brain by preventing toxins from reaching it. This presents dementia researchers with a significant challenge because the blood-brain barrier also prevents treatments getting through to the brain and working effectively. Newer immunotherapy drugs, also known as biologics, are large complex molecules or mixtures of molecules, which because of their size and shape may only partly cross the blood-brain barrier. This suggests that dangerous doses would be needed for them to work effectively. And even if the biologics could penetrate the blood-brain barrier and target the proteins causing damage to brain cells, dementia is irreversible and may have started to develop decades before the presentation of symptoms and before the administration of drugs. Further, there is no test for dementia, which means the disorder is difficult to diagnose. This leads some health professionals to suggest that with no effective treatments, early diagnosis has no benefits. A significant proportion of those living with dementia have not received a formal diagnosis, which presents further challenges not least for clinical studies.
 
The amyloid hypothesis

For the past 2 decades dementia drug development has been dominated by the ‘amyloid hypothesis’, which suggests that Alzheimer’s can be treated by attacking the sticky plaques of beta amyloid protein that builds up in patients’ brains. The pharmaceutical industry has lost billions in failed development of drugs designed to target amyloid, and there is still no treatment that affects the underlying progression of the disease. In January 2018 Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, which has spent billions on dementia R&D, announced that it was pulling out of research into drugs to treat complex neurological disorders. Notwithstanding, many pharmaceutical companies, driven by the potential financial gains from finding a medicine that can arrest the disease of 50m people, continue to work on treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.
 
Innovative research endeavours that target dementia

The UK’s 2013 presidency of the G8, (an inter-governmental political forum comprised of the major industrialized democracies) focused on dementia. This resulted in the condition rising up global political agendas and the UK Government unlocking more money for research into neurodegenerative disorders. In 2015 the UK government with the help of JP Morgan, an American multinational investment bank, set-up the Dementia Discovery Fund, with an initial investment of £15m and the commitment from several big pharmaceutical companies to invest. The fund’s strategy was to raise £100m for dementia R&D and move beyond the amyloid hypothesis. It has invested in some 12 start-ups and projects investigating novel ways to stop or reverse the complex biological processes that lead to dementia. In November 2017 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested US$50m into the fund, which took its total to £130m. Other well-funded novel research projects include the UK Dementia Research Institute, which brings together the Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK in a £250m initiative involving more than 400 scientists, who are leading efforts to transform the treatment and care for people with dementia.
 
Takeaways

Dementia is a 21st century Damocles Sword positioned to bankrupt healthcare systems in the developed world. Dementia is a vast, fast growing global killer disease effecting about 7% of people living in wealthy nations and costing billions. Despite billions spent on dementia R&D over the past 2 decades there are no viable treatments to either slow or stop the progression of the disorder. Alcohol use has been suggested as a significant contributory factor for the onset dementia. Public policies to curb the use of alcohol are insufficient to significantly dent the vast and escalating burden of dementia. This shifts the emphasis for a solution to medicine. Despite the dearth of medical solutions, things are beginning to change with some recent novel research initiatives specifically targeting neurodegenerative disorders, which might help to lift the Damocles Sword. 
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Dr Anil Garg

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Dr. Anil Garg is the director of Rejuvenate Plastic, Cosmetic and Hair Transplant in India Centre. The Centre is located in the prime area of Indore, the financial capital of Madhya Pradesh, India.

Dr. Garg has done MS in general surgery and MCh in plastic reconstructive surgery. He did his fellowship in microsurgery from CG Memorial Hospital, Taiwan and fellowship in Peripheral nerve surgery from EVM medical school Nor fork, Virginia, USA. He is also a Diplomate of the American board of hair restoration. He is a fellow of International Society of hair restoration surgery. He is a member of Association of Plastic surgeons of India, World society of Reconstructive microsurgery, Association of hair restoration of India, Asia, and international societies.

At present Dr. Garg is the honorary secretary of the Association of hair restoration surgeons of India. Dr.Garg is an active hair transplant surgeon for the past 10 years and has been operating cases by FUE, FUT, and BHT. Dr. Garg has done many innovations and research in this field and got many awards and has many national and international publications.


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3 months, 3 weeks ago

Cancer drugs that neither improve nor extend lives

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  • More than 50% of cancer drugs available in the UK do nothing to extend or improve the lives of patients
  • The efficacy of drugs was not considered by authorities as a factor in the UK’s higher cancer mortality rates compared with other European nations
  • Recent scientific and technological advances have significantly changed our understanding of cancer biology and impacted cancer diagnoses and treatments
  • Increasingly traditional randomized controlled trials (RCT) are viewed as too long, too expensive and too inefficient

Cancer drugs that neither improve nor extend lives 
 
 
A retrospective cohort study of drug approvals published in the October 2017 edition of the British Medical Journal, (BMJ) found that 57% of cancer drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) between 2009 and 2013 and prescribed to UK patients do nothing to extend or improve their lives.
 
Recurring explanations for Britain’s cancer mortality rates lagging those of other European nations make no mention of the quality of cancer medicines. Although cancer drugs approved by the EMA might be expected to affect all European nations equally, drug efficacy is a significant factor in cancer care, and merits consideration. Not least because the ‘revolution’ in molecular science is responsible for the shift from the medicine for crowds to the medicine of molecules; from treating diseases to treating individuals. Traditional regulatory protocols support crowd-science medicine and struggle to find ways to adjust to molecular science.
  
In this Commentary

Before describing the findings of the BMJ study, we briefly provide descriptions of 4 of the 48 drugs scrutinized in the BMJ paper and approved by the EMA. Within this context we describe the role of the UK’s Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) and its relation to the EMA. We then describe the findings of the BMJ study and mention a cautionary note about the research suggested by BMJ editors. It is not altogether clear that criticism of cancer drugs coming to market without showing any sign that they extend life will put pressure on regulatory bodies to change their protocols before recommending drugs for use in clinics. There is evidence to suggest an opposite position: that randomized controlled trials, the “gold standard” for drug delivery over the past 70 years, are increasingly challenged by molecular science and are changing as a result.
 
4 cancer drugs scrutinized

Four of the 48 drugs scrutinized by the study reported in the October 2017 edition of the BMJ were: 1. Everolimus, which is a type of targeted therapy for breast cancer, (also indicated for kidney cancer and brain tumours). It is taken as a tablet once a day for an average of 5.5 months at a cost of about £18,000 per patient per course. Each year, some 1,500 breast cancer patients are eligible for the drug. Evertlomus is manufactured by Novartis, and sold under the trade name Afinitor. The drug stops some of the growth of cancer cells and slows their spread. Side effects include diarrhoea, constipation, mild nausea or vomiting and weight loss. Evertlomus was approved by the EMA in 2012 without either survival rate or quality of life data. In 2016 it was moved on to routine provision through the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the UK government’s watchdog. 2. Bosutinib, which is a drug taken either as a tablet or a capsule and used by adult patients to treat chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), which has an abnormal chromosome called the ‘Philadelphia chromosome’. 95% of people with CML have the Philadelphia chromosome. Bosutinib is manufactured by Pfizer, marketed under the trade name Bosulif and is used when other CML treatments no longer work or cause severe side effects. In 2013 bosutinib was approved by the EMA with no evidence that it extended life. Each year about 80 NHS England patients receive the drug at an annual cost per patient of about £45,000. Patients have blood tests before starting and during treatment to monitor the effect of the drug. Up to 85% of patients see white blood cells return to normal levels. The most common adverse reactions, which affect more than 20% of patients, include diarrhoea, nausea, abdominal pain, rash, anaemia, and fatigue. Serious adverse reactions reported include anaphylactic shock. 3.Panitumumab, which is a targeted biological therapy belonging to a group of drugs called monoclonal antibodies. These are drugs that stimulate the body's immune system to act against cancer cells. Panitumumab is used for the treatment of advanced bowel cancer, which has progressed after treatment with other drugs. It is administered via a small cannula into a vein and works by attaching itself to growth factor specific proteins found on the surface of cells and stopping them from attaching themselves to the cancer and triggering the cancer to divide and grow. Panitumumab is manufactured by Amgen and sold under the trade name Vectibix. The drug was approved by the EMA in 2011 without evidence that it extended life.  However, more recent data suggest panitumumab boosts survival by 10 months more than other treatments. Common side effects include skin reactions, diarrhoea, nausea, tiredness and constipation. Each year about 84 NHS England patients are given the drug. In 2017 NICE made panitumumab routinely available at a cost of about £54,000 per year per patient. 4. Bevacizumab, which is a drug that blocks a cancer cell protein that helps cancers to grow by providing them with blood. It  belongs to a class of cancer treatments, which interfere with the development of blood supply to cancers called ‘anti-angiogenesis therapies’. Bevacizumab is manufactured by Roche, marketed as Avastin and costs £42,000 per patient per year. It is administered intravenously, and side effects include mild headache, back pain, diarrhoea, loss of appetite, cold symptoms and dry or watery eyes. Bevacizumab was approved by the EMA in 2009 with no evidence that it extended life and is not available on the NHS. Initially the drug was available in the UK on the Cancer Drugs Fund but was stopped in 2015. Clinical studies show that bevacizumab stops the progression of the disease for an average of 3 months.
 
The UK’s Cancer Drugs Fund

These and the other drugs examined in the BMJ paper were all approved by the European Medicines Agency. This approval permits pharmaceutical companies to market their medicines across Europe. NHS England, however, will not use medicines unless NICE assesses them as showing value for money. The UK’s Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) was specifically introduced in England in 2011 to provide a means by which NHS England patients could obtain cancer drugs rejected by NICE because they were too expensive. Some of the drugs deemed by the researchers to have shown no benefit are now available to UK patients, but only after pharmaceutical companies reduced their prices.  
Findings
 
The BMJ study is significant because it is one of the only recent studies that has systematically examined evidence associated with the extent of the benefits of cancer drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency. Researchers, from Kings College London and the London School of Economics, who conducted the study assessed 48 cancer drugs for 68 indications approved during the 5 year study period and concluded that, at the time of market approval, there was an improvement in the quality of life  for only 7 of 68 indications and no evidence of a survival gain for 44 indications. However, subsequent evidence showed that life was extended in 3 indications and quality of life was enhanced in 5.
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When drugs did show survival gains over existing treatments the benefits were marginal, the report says. Treatments that improved life expectancy gave patients a median of an extra 2.7 months of life often at significant cost. Notwithstanding, researchers stressed that when someone is dying of cancer even a few extra months of life with loved ones are priceless, and they also understood that it takes time to prove a drug will improve life expectancy. Notwithstanding, researchers suggested that drug firms could be needlessly raising the hopes of cancer patients and exposing them to unnecessary side effects. “At a minimum of 3.3 years after market entry, there was still no conclusive evidence that these drugs either extended or improved life for most cancer indications,” researchers said. Of the 68 cancer indications with EMA approval, and with a median of 5.4 years’ follow-up, 35 had shown a significant improvement in survival or quality of life, while 33 remained uncertain.
 
“It is remarkable that cancer drugs enter the European market without any clear data on outcomes that matter to patients and their doctors: longer survival and better quality of life,” said Huseyin Naci, a co-author. “There is a clear need to raise the bar for approving new cancer drugs. When expensive drugs that lack robust evidence of clinical benefit are approved and reimbursed within publicly funded healthcare systems, individual patients may be harmed, and public funds wasted,” say the researchers. “There is growing concern that the benefits offered by many new treatments for cancer, which are often discussed and promoted as ‘breakthroughs’, are marginal and might not be clinically meaningful to patients, despite rapidly escalating costs,” says Courtney Davis of Kings College London  (KCL) and the lead author of the study.
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Editors’ note of caution

Editors of the BMJ noted that the study was limited by the EMA’s“incomplete and variable” reporting of clinical studies, which contributed to the “possible overestimation of the proportion of drugs that offer survival or quality of life benefits”. They further suggested that the researchers did not consider the “appropriateness of clinical trial design”, which affects patient outcomes, and they also failed to take into account the “negative studies” for the indications they were studying.
 
Randomized controlled trials

Paradigm shifts in science, rapidly changing technologies, the increasing influence of patient advocacy groups and economic pressures on pharmaceutical companies are conspiring to drive change in randomized controlled trials (RCT), which were introduced 70 years ago to reduce bias when testing for a new treatment. RCTs have reshaped medical knowledge and practice and have become the “gold standard” means to assess the clinical efficacy of new or improved cancer therapies. In such procedures participants are randomly assigned to receive either the treatment under investigation or, as a control, a placebo or the current standard treatment. The randomization process helps ensure that the various groups in the study are identical across a number of relevant variables such as age, gender and socioeconomic status. This minimizes the potential for bias. Despite their strengths, only a modest percentage of therapies successfully navigate the regulatory minefield of RCTs from early stage to final approval. It takes between 10 to 15 years for a drug to pass through all the development stages and become approved for prescription. Only 5 in 5,000 drugs that enter preclinical testing progress to human testing, and only 1 in 5 of these is approved for prescription in clinics. The cost of developing a drug that gains market approval is estimated to be about US$2.6bn.  
 
Enhanced understanding of cancer biology

One of the main limitations of cancer care has been our understanding of the biology of the disease, but this is beginning to change. Over the past 2 decades, oncologists have witnessed significant advances in our understanding of cancer biology and major breakthroughs in a number of therapeutic areas, which impact on drug targets and drug development. For example, next generation genome sequencing has increased the application of more robust models for different types of cancers. Cancer immunotherapy has captured the attention of scientists and has become a significant focus for drug delivery, and the development of genome editing technologies such as CRISPR Cas-9 have significantly impacted the direction and progress of nonclinical anticancer drug development.

Personalized medicine approaches have led to significant changes in the way oncology is practiced. Clinical and translational research is adapting to a rapidly changing environment with the intention to effectively translate novel concepts into sustainable and accessible therapeutic options for cancer patients, but not without significant challenges. Some of which are described by Axel Walther a medical oncologist and Director for Research in Oncology at University Hospitals Bristol, see video below. “If we combine patients in clinical trials with the concept of personalized medicine we start to add a lot of variables. This is because we want to target a novel treatment to the individual cancer of a specific patient. The challenge is to find that patient for whom the specific treatment is appropriate. If you have a treatment that addresses a specific abnormality you need to find all the patients with that abnormality. This is relatively easy if it’s a common abnormality but significantly more difficult if the abnormality isn’t common,” says Walther.
 
 
Pressures to change RCTs

Such scientific advances have shifted the emphasis of cancer treatment from histopathologically based methods (the microscopic examination of tissue in order to study the manifestations of disease) to molecular and genetically based treatments, which has significantly improved our understanding of disease processes and advanced drug development. Technologies, which use high-throughput screening of a number of potential target molecules are significant additions to our investigational medicinal product portfolio. Further, enhanced big data assets benefit from enhanced high volume, high velocity, high variety processing and interpretation and increasingly provide new and significant opportunities to conduct large-scale studies with many of the benefits of RCTs but without the expense. Big data techniques also allow for the study of rare cancers effecting small populations, which are often excluded from RCTs because of cost and other constraints. Such scientific and technological advances, together with the rapid expansion of the portfolio of therapeutic modalities, which can be used in various combinations to improve clinical outcomes, challenge traditional RCTs. Further, the costs and increasing complexity of RCTs means that promising drug candidates are sometimes abandoned for economic or logistical reasons rather than for their efficacy. For these reasons regulatory bodies, including the EMA, support changes in RCTs and are encouraging ‘adaptive clinical trials”.
 
 Adaptive clinical trials

Adaptive clinical trials can be used in every phase of drug development. Rather than wait until the end of the trial to analyse data, adaptive trials accumulate and analyse data during the trial period and use results to change the actual direction of the trial. Adapting trials in this way is expected to reduce risks for both patients and pharmaceutical companies, particularly at challenging decision-points, such as dose selection. Significantly, adaptive trials can reduce the total number of patients required to obtain results. This, cuts cost and alleviates time constraints on sponsors, researchers, monitors, and trial sites and increases the capacity of the entire clinical development system. Notwithstanding, a concern is that data from such studies tend to be challenging to provide definitive answers.
 
Takeaways

Researchers drew attention to the fact that a significant number of cancer drugs become available in the UK without evidence that they significantly extend life. The slow pace and the eye-watering costs of traditional RCTs are increasingly being challenged by pharmaceutical companies, governments, scientists, patient advocacy groups and regulators. Fuelling such challenges is the unprecedented pace of change in our understanding of cancer biology, which has significantly influenced drug development and the modalities of treatments. New science is positioned to transform medicine beyond our recognition. But the science itself and the process by which it is transformed into useful medicine collide with RCTs.
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5 months ago

UK cancer care lags that of other European nations: reasons and solutions - Part 1

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  • International study shows that while British cancer survival has improved over the past 20 years the UK’s cancer survival rates lag behind the European average in 9 out of 10 cancers
  • 10,000 cancer deaths could be prevented each year if the UK hit the European average
  • Analysis shows that some British cancer survival rates trail that of developing nations such as Jordan, Puerto Rico, Algeria and Ecuador
  • Since the inception of the NHS in 1948 policy makers and clinicians have viewed the problem as the NHS being under staffed and underfunded
  • But the answers to the cancer care challenge in the UK are not that straight forward
  • The world has changed and is changing while policy responses to challenges have remained static
 
UK cancer care lags that of other European nations: reasons and solutions
Part 1
 
This Commentary is in 2 parts
Part 1 focusses on cancer care in the UK, but much of its substance is relevant to other advanced nations with aging populations and large and escalating incidence rates and costs of cancer. Before drilling down into cancer care in Britain we briefly describe the etiology of cancer, the epidemiology of the condition as it relates to the UK and other wealthy nations, mention immunotherapy as indicative of evolving and significant new therapies, which give hope to cancer sufferers. We then describe the CONCORD-3 study reported in The Lancet in 2018. This is a highly regarded and significant international study, whose findings are widely recognised as the “gold standard” of comparative cancer care. It reports that although 5-year cancer survival rates (the internationally accepted indicator of cancer care) have improved in Britain over the past 2 decades, the UK is still trailing that of most large European countries. We conclude Part 1 with a brief description of UK initiatives to close its cancer-gap with other European countries.
 
Part 2, which will be published in 2 weeks, is an analysis of the cancer-gap between Britain and other European countries. We suggest that for decades, healthcare providers, policy makers and leading clinicians have suggested that the UK cancer-care gap is because of the lack of funding and the lack of healthcare professionals. Since the inception of the NHS in 1948 a policy mantra of “more” has taken root among policy makers, providers and clinicians: predominantly, “more money”, “more staff”, and “the government should do more”. We suggest that, over the lifetime of NHS England, a combination of Britain’s economic growth, its historical ties with Commonwealth countries and, since 1973, the reduction of barriers to the flow of labour between European countries, has given UK policy makers a convenient “get-out-of-jail-card” because they could always provide more money and more staff. Over the past 2 decades, this option has become less and less effective because of a combination of the slowdown of world economic growth, the rise of emerging economies such as India, and more recently Brexit.
 
We conclude with some thoughts about why a significant cancer care gap has opened between the UK and other European nations, and briefly describe some UK initiatives to close the gap. We suggest that the world has changed quicker than the thinking of policy makers and quicker than structural changes in the UK’s healthcare system. Improving cancer care in the Britain will require more than inertia projects. It will require more innovation, more long-term planning, more courage from policy makers, more focus on actual patients’ needs rather than what we are simply able to provide. Since 1948, the healthcare baton in the UK has been with an establishment comprised of policy makers, providers and leading clinicians. Over the past 70 years this establishment has become increasingly entrenched in past and narrow policy solutions. It has failed because the world has changed while It has remained static. It is time that the healthcare baton is passed to people with less self-interest at stake, who are less wedded to the past, and understand the new and rapidly evolving global healthcare ecosystem.
 
The UK’s cancer challenge

While British policy makers and health providers appear keen to stress that trends in the 5-year cancer survival rates (the internationally accepted measure for progress against cancer) have improved over the past 20 years, there is an element of “economy with the truth” in what they say. The UK is being left behind by significant advances in cancer survival rates in other nations. Treatment for 3.7m UK cancer patients diagnosed since 2000 is struggling to progress, especially for people diagnosed with brain, stomach and blood cancers. Further, your chances of dying after being diagnosed with prostate, pancreatic and lung cancer in Britain is significantly higher than in any other large European nation. This is according to CONCORD-3, the largest ever international cancer study reported in the January 2018 edition of the The Lancet.
 
The emperor of all maladies
 
Cancer is the uncontrolled proliferation of cells. In his 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning book, ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’, Siddhartha Mukherjee, professor of oncology at Columbia University Medical School in New York describes cancer cells as, "bloated and grotesque, with a dilated nucleus and a thin rim of cytoplasm, the sign of a cell whose very soul has been co-opted to divide and to keep dividing with pathological, monomaniacal purpose." Cancer occurs when a cell starts to divide repeatedly, producing abnormal copies of itself, rather than dividing occasionally just to replace worn out cells. If the immune system fails to destroy these cells, they continue to reproduce and invade and destroy surrounding healthy tissue. A number of forces can trigger these cell divisions, such as certain chemicals (carcinogens), chronic inflammation, hormones, lack of exercise, obesity, radiation, smoking, and viruses. ‘The emperor of all maladies’ is not just one disease. There are over 200 different types of cancer, each with its own methods of diagnosis and treatment. Most cancers are named after the organ or type of cell in which they start: for example, cancer that begins in the breast is called breast cancer. Cancer sometimes begins in one part of the body and can spread to other parts of the body through the blood and lymph systems This process is known as metastasis.
 
A practitioners’ views

According to Whitfield Growdon, an oncological surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Reproductive Biology at the Harvard University Medical School, “Cancer is a complicated set of events, which can happen in any cell in your body. Your body is comprised of tiny cells, which have the ability to grow, stop growing and to re-model, which is necessary to do all the functions that are required for living. But every cell in nature has the potential to lose control of its growth. It is this uncontrolled growth of an individual cell, which we call cancer. Cells can grow, they can spread, and if the cell growth is uncontrolled it can invade other tissues, which can lead to you losing the ability to perform vital functions that are required for your life,” see video below:
 
 
Epidemiology

There is scarcely a family in the developed world unaffected by cancer. But, this has not always been the case. Cancer only became a leading cause of death when we began to live long enough to get it. In 1911, the prevalence of cancer was low compared to what it is today. Then life expectancy in the UK was 51.5 and 52.2 years for males and females respectively. Similarly, in the US, at the beginning of the 20th century, life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years. Today, the median life expectancy in the UK is 81.6 and in the US 78.7.  Significantly, the age at diagnosis for prostate cancer today is 67 and 61 for breast cancer. Approximately 12% of the UK population are aged 70 and above and account for 50.2% of the total cancers registered in 2014. 87% of all cancers in the US are diagnosed in people over 50.
Late diagnoses
 
Every 2 minutes in Britain someone is diagnosed with cancer, and almost 50% of these are diagnosed at a late stage. Every year in the UK there are more than 360,000 new cancer cases, which equates to nearly 990 newly diagnosed cancers every day. Taking a closer look at the UK data, we notice that since the early 1990s, incidence rates for all cancers combined have increased by 12%. The increase is larger in females than males. Over the past decade, incidence rates for all cancers combined have increased by 7%, with a larger increase in females: 8% as opposed to 3% in males. Over the next 2 decades, incidence rates for all cancers combined in Britain are projected to rise by 2%. Incidence rates in the UK are lower than in most European nations in males, but higher in females.

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Incidence rates of specific cancers in the UK

In 2015, breast, prostate, lung and bowel cancers together account for some 53% of all new cancer cases in the UK. Over the past decade, thyroid and liver cancers have shown the fastest increases in incidence in both males and females.  Incidence rates of melanoma, small intestine, and kidney cancers have also increased markedly in males over the past 10 years. Over the same period, Incidence rates of kidney, melanoma, and head and neck cancers have also increased markedly in females. Despite the rise in incidence rates, in recent years mortality rates from cancer in England and Wales have fallen. Between 1994 and 2013, mortality rates from cancer for males and females fell by 30% and 22% respectively.
 
New therapies: immunotherapy/biologics
 
What gives hope to people living with cancer is partly new and innovative therapies. Over the past few decades immunotherapy, also called biological therapy, is an evolving treatment, which has become a significant part of the management of certain cancers. Immunotherapy is any form of treatment that uses the body's natural abilities that constitute the immune system to fight infection and disease or to protect the body from some of the side effects of treatment. This may be achieved either by stimulating your own immune system to attack cancer cells specifically, or by giving your immune system components to boost your body’s immune system in a general way. Immunotherapy works better for some types of cancer than for others. It is used by itself for some cancers, but for others it seems to work better when used with other types of therapy.

According to Hani Gabra, Professor of Medical Oncology at Imperial College, London, and Chief Physician Scientist and Head of the Oncology Discovery Unit at AstraZeneca, UK, “Biological therapies are treatments gaining importance globally as we progress with the management of cancer. Understanding the biology of cancer has enabled us to understand the targets that go wrong in those cancers. We have successfully used many treatments that hit directly those cancer targets in order to inhibit or “switch-off” the cancers. These biological therapies either can be useful on their own or more commonly, combined with standard treatments such as chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy.” See video below:
 
 
Why is the CONCORD-3 study significant?

CONCORD-3 reported in a 2018 edition of The Lancet is an international scientific collaboration designed to monitor trends in the survival of cancer patients throughout the world, and involves 600 investigators in over 300 institutions in 71 countries. The study compares the overall effectiveness of health systems to provide care for 18 cancer types, which collectively represent 75% of all cancers diagnosed worldwide. The study is specifically designed to: (i) monitor trends in the survival rates of cancer patients world-wide to 2014, (ii) inform national and global policy on cancer control, and (iii) enable a comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of health systems in providing cancer care. The study is the third of its kind and supports the over-arching goal of the 2013 World Cancer Declaration, to achieve “major reductions in premature deaths from cancer, and improvements in quality of life and cancer survival”.
 
CONCORD’s evidence base
 
The evidence base of the CONCORD-3 study is significant and is predicated upon the clinical records of 37.5m patients diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2014. Data are provided in over 4,700 data sets by 322 population-based cancer registries from 71 countries and territories; 47 of which provided data with 100% population coverage. The analysis is centralised, based upon tight protocols and standardised quality controls, and employs cutting-edge methods. The 71 participating countries and territories are home to a combined population of 4.9bn (UN figures for 2014). This represents 67% of the world's population (7.3bn). The 322 participating cancer registries contributed data on all cancer patients diagnosed among their combined resident populations of almost 1bn people (989m), which is 20% of the combined population of those countries. CONCORD-3 contributes to the evidence base for global policy on cancer management and control.
 
CONCORD-3 data base drives national and global policies on cancer control

Despite the care taken of the data management processes, no study is perfect, and It is reasonable to assume that a study the size of CONCORD-3 will have weaknesses. Notwithstanding, the study is “best in class” and its results are comparable within the limits of data quality. The international trends in cancer patient survival reported in the study reflect the comparative effectiveness of health systems in managing cancer patients. The findings of CONCORD-3 form part of the evidence that drives national and international policies on cancer control. For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency use the findings in its campaign to highlight global inequalities in cancer survival. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OEDC) use the results of CONCORD as indicators of the quality of healthcare in 48 countries in its Health at a Glance publications, and the European Union use the findings in its Country Health Profiles for EU Member States.
 
Overall cancer survival is improving

Overall findings of the CONCORD-3 study suggest that the prospects for cancer patients are improving throughout the world and survival rates are increasing for some lethal cancers. Several cancers show significant increases in 5-year survival, including breast (80% to 86%), prostate (82% to 89%), rectum (55% to 63%) and colon (52% to 60%); reflecting better cancer management. Notwithstanding, there are significant differences in cancer outcomes between nations.
 
UK has worse cancer survival rates compared with other European nations

Despite the fact that increasingly more people are surviving cancer, British adult cancer patients continue to have worse survival rates after 5 years compared to the European average in 9 out of 10 cancers. Research comparing 29 countries shows survival rates in Sweden are almost 33% higher than in the UK. For ovarian cancer, which affects 7,400 British women each year, the UK comes 45th out of 59, with only 36.2% sufferers surviving 5 years. Some countries achieve nearly double this survival rate. When the largest 5 European countries - Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain - were compared for the 3 most common cancers, Britain came bottom for 2 of them. Britain’s survival rates were worse than the other 4 European nations for lung and prostate cancer, and second worst for breast cancer. With regard to pancreatic cancer British patients had just a 6.8% chance of survival, compared to 7.7% in Spain, 8.6% in France, 9.2% in Italy and 10.7% in Germany. This puts the UK 47th out of the 56 countries that had full data for this cancer. Studies suggest 10,000 deaths could be prevented each year if the UK were to keep up with the European average. The UK only exceeds the European average in melanoma. See table below.
 
 
Takeaways

Here we have introduced and described the findings of CONCORD-3, which suggests the UK lags significantly other European nations with regard to cancer survival rates.  This sets the scene for part 2 of this Commentary, which will briefly describe some of the UK’s cancer initiatives to reduce premature death from cancer and enhance the care of people living with the disorder. Much has been achieved and over the past 2 decades, cancer mortality rates in the UK have been significantly reduced. Notwithstanding, more innovative and effective policies, which address the actual needs of patients rather than provide “more money and more staff” will be required if the UK is to reduce the cancer-care gap.
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UK cancer care lags that of other European nations: reasons and solutions - Part 2

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  • International study shows that while British cancer survival has improved over the past 20 years the UK’s cancer survival rates lag behind the European average in 9 out of 10 cancers
  • 10,000 cancer deaths could be prevented each year if the UK hit the European average
  • Analysis shows that some British cancer survival rates trail that of developing nations such as Jordan, Puerto Rico, Algeria and Ecuador
  • Since the inception of the NHS in 1948 policy makers and clinicians have viewed the problem as the NHS being under staffed and underfunded
  • But the answers to the cancer care challenge in the UK is not straightforward
  • The global healthcare ecosystem has changed and is continuing to change faster than national policy responses
  • The UK’s cancer care challenges require more innovation not just more reports, more money and more staff
  
UK cancer care lags that of other European nations: reasons and solutions
Part 2

Part 1 of this Commentary  described the CONCORD-3 study reported in the January 2018 edition of The Lancet, which suggested that although 5-year cancer survival rates (the internationally accepted indicator of cancer care) have improved in Britain over the past 2 decades, the UK lags behind most large European countries in cancer care.
 
This is part 2 of the Commentary, which begins by describing some of the UK’s initiatives over the past 20 years to improve cancer mortality rates, speed up diagnoses and enhance the quality of cancer care for people living with the disease. All arrive at similar conclusions: that UK cancer care strategies have reduced cancer mortality rates over time, but there is still more that can be done. They do not compare Britain’s cancer mortality rates with other European nations. Notwithstanding, there appears to be some consensus among leading clinicians and policy makers that the UK’s failure to close the cancer care gap with other European nations is because NHS England is underfunded and understaffed. While this explanation might provide part of the answer it does not tell the whole story. The answer might be less to do with extra funds and extra staff, and more to do with the fact that the global healthcare ecosystem has changed quicker than the thinking of UK policy makers and quicker than structural changes to NHS England. To the extent that this is the case, improving cancer care in Britain may not require more money and more staff, but more innovation and more focus on actual patients’ needs rather than on what policy makers can provide politically.
 
National cancer initiatives: resolving patients’ needs or perpetuating the status quo?
 
Over the past 20 years the UK government has commissioned a number of strategies, taskforces and reports all aimed at improving cancer diagnoses, treatments, and management, and enhancing the quality of life of people living with the disease and reducing premature deaths. In 2000, NHS England launched a National Cancer Plan, which was, “committed to addressing health inequalities through setting new national and local targets for the reduction of smoking rates, the setting of new targets for the reduction of waiting times, the establishment of national standards for cancer services, and investment in specialist palliative care, the expansion and development of the cancer workforce, cancer facilities, and cancer research.” This was followed in 2007 by the Cancer Reform Strategy, which was designed to build, “on the progress made since the publication of the NHS Cancer Plan in 2000, and sets a clear direction for cancer services for the next five years. It shows how by 2012 our cancer services can and should become among the best in the world.”
 
Independent cancer taskforce
 
In January 2015, an Independent Cancer Taskforce was launched by NHS England, “to develop a five-year action plan for cancer services that will improve survival rates and save thousands of lives.” The NHS established the taskforce on behalf of the Care Quality Commission, Health Education England, Monitor,  Public Health England and theTrust Development Authority. The taskforce was chaired by Harpal Kumar, then, CEO of Cancer Research UK, and was comprised of representatives from a cross section of the cancer and healthcare communities.

In July 2015, the Independent Cancer Taskforce published a report entitled: Achieving world-class cancer outcomes: a strategy for England 2015-2020. The report identified key elements of a world class cancer care system and suggested that this is what British cancer patients should expect and what NHS England should aim to provide by 2020. The strategy included, “effective prevention (so that people do not get cancer at all if possible); prompt and accurate diagnosis; informed choice and convenient care; access to the best effective treatments with minimal side effects; always knowing what is going on and why; holistic support; and the best possible quality of life, including at the end of life.” According to the report such a strategy would achieve world-class cancer outcomes and save 30,000 lives a year by 2020.
 
2nd National Cancer Strategy

Two months before the publication of the Taskforce’s report, in May 2015, the UK government launched a National Cancer Strategy. This was its second 5-year program to implement a world-class cancer strategy designed to increase the prevention of cancer, speed up its diagnosis, and improve the experience of people with the condition. It suggested that rapid progress had been made in a number of key and high-impact areas, and stated that, “if someone is diagnosed with cancer, they should be able to live for as long and as well as is possible, regardless of their background or where they live. They should be diagnosed early, so that the most effective treatments are available to them, and they should get the highest quality care and support from the moment cancer is suspected.”

Report of the National Cancer Transformational Board
 
In December 2016, a National Cancer Transformation Board, led by Cally Palmer, the Cancer Director for England, published a number of specific steps to improve cancer care, and reported that over the past decade, 5-year cancer survival rates in the UK have improved across all main cancers, and at the end of 2016, cancer survival rates in Britain were at a record high with 7,000 more people surviving cancer compared to 2013.
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Interim report of the 2nd National Cancer Strategy

In October 2017, NHS England published an interim report of its 2015 National Cancer Strategy, which suggested that, “Survival rates for cancer have never been higher, and overall patients report a very good experience of care. However, we know there is more we can do to ensure patients are diagnosed early and quickly and that early diagnosis has a major impact on survival. We also know that patients continue to experience variation in their access to care, and this needs to be addressed. Early diagnosis, fast diagnosis and equity of access to treatment and care are central to the ‘National Cancer Programme’ and the transformation of services we want to achieve by 2020-21.” According to an NHS spokesperson, “Figures show that cancer survival is now at an all-time high in England, as a result of better access to screening, funding for effective new treatments and diagnostics and continued action to reduce smoking.”
 
Why cancer mortality rates in Britain lag other European countries
 
“If you look at similar European countries the proportion of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) the UK has spent on health in the last 10 to 15 years is low and has increased less than the others,” says Michael Coleman, Professor of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and co-author of the international cancer study reported in the March 2018 edition of The Lancet. UK healthcare spending fell from 8.8% of GDP in 2009 - when it averaged 10.1% in leading European countries - to 7.3% in 2014-15. “This difference between the likes of Germany and France is likely to explain some of what we are seeing,” says Coleman and he also suggests that, “The number of medical specialists who deal with these diseases [cancer] tends to be low compared to other similar countries,” [Our emphasis]. Let us examine the relative European healthcare spends and levels of staffing in NHS England.
 
Comparative GDP spends on healthcare

The OECD’s November 2016 Health at a Glance report suggests that in 2013 (the latest year for which data have been published) the UK spent 8.5% of its GDP on public and private healthcare. And, a 2016 report from the King’s Fund, a charity, suggests that projected spending on NHS England as a proportion of the UK’s GDP in 2020-21 is 6.6%, just 0.3% above what it was in 2000.
 
Challenges comparing healthcare spends

Notwithstanding, linking cancer mortality rates to the proportion of GDP nations spend on healthcare is not straightforward. This is partly because of, (i) different nations have different sources of healthcare funding, and (ii) a person’s purchasing power is different in different countries. Fluctuations in relative national economic growth make such comparisons over time and between nations challenging. According to The Health Foundation, a higher percentage of UKhealthcare spending is publicly funded compared to other European countries. For example, “In 2012, publicly funded spending accounted for 84.0% of UK healthcare spending. This is the third highest level in the EU-15 (average: 76.5%).  In 2012, UK public spending on healthcare was slightly higher than the EU-15 average of 7.6% of GDP”. Between 2008 and 2012 the average annual change in healthcare spending per person was lower for the UK than most EU-15 countries, which was largely the result of Greece, Ireland and Portugal making significant cuts to their healthcare spending. The rising prevalence of cancer and other chronic long-term diseases, is a significant driver of increased healthcare costs. According to OEDC data, UK spend on chronic lifetime conditions is similar to the European average. However, the UK spends less than other European countries on pharmaceuticals and out-of-pocket payments. Further, on average, UK patients spend less time in hospital and generally use fewer resources (measured in terms of staff and beds).
 
A 2017 paper published by the Nuffield Trust suggests that, when taking into consideration different sources of healthcare funding and purchasing power parity, the UK’s healthcare spend actually might be keeping up with that of other European nations.
 
NHS “dangerously” understaffed

Let us now consider staffing. In 2017, The Royal College of Emergency Medicine reported that primary and emergency care doctors, which are crucial for the early diagnosis of cancer, were experiencing significant recruitment and retention challenges. According to 2018 figures, NHS England has nearly 100,000 jobs unfilled, which include 35,000 nursing posts and 10,000 doctor vacancies.  The total vacancies represent 1 in 12 of all NHS posts, which is enough to staff about 10 large hospitals. Further, the high number of unfilled NHS posts coincides with 0.25m more people visiting A&E in the first quarter of 2018 than in the equivalent period in 2016. According to Saffron Cordery, the director of policy and strategy for NHS Providers, “These figures show how the NHS has been pushed to the limit. Despite working at full stretch with around 100,000 vacancies and a real risk of staff burnout, and despite treating 6% more emergency patients, year on year in December (2017), trusts cannot close the gap between what they are being asked to deliver and the funding available”. A February 2018 finance report suggests that NHS England is heading for a £931m deficit in 2018 and is "dangerously" understaffed. This year-on-year deficit was revised to a projected £1.3bn shortfall, which is 88% worse than planned.
 
Reasons for shortages of health professionals

The NHS staffing challenges are aggravated by the fact that British trainee primary care doctors are dwindling, newly qualified doctors are moving abroad, and experienced doctors are retiring early. Over the lifetime of NHS England, the UK has trained significantly fewer healthcare professionals than it needed, and the supply of qualified young British people has consistently outstripped the number of places in medical schools and nurse training. According to data from the General Medical Council (GMC), between 2008 and 2014 an average of 2,852 certificates were issued annually to enable British doctors to work abroad. A 2015 British Medical Association (BMA) poll of 15,560 primary care doctors, found that 34% of respondents plan to retire early because of high stress levels, increasing workloads, and too little time with patients.  Further, it is estimated that 10% of doctors and 7% of nurses employed by NHS England are nationals of other European countries. The uncertainties of Brexit (a term for the potential departure of the UK from the EU) add to NHS’s recruitment and retention challenges of healthcare professionals. According to a 2017 Health Foundation Report, in 2016, more than 2,700 nurses left the NHS; an increase of 68% since 2014.
 
UK policy approach to healthcare shortages has not changed

Notwithstanding, NHS staff shortages are not new. In the 1960s, NHS hospitals in Britain introduced mass recruitment from Commonwealth countries, and this has influenced staffing policies ever since. Being able to recruit doctors and nurses from foreign countries provided NHS England with an “easy” solution to staff shortages. However, over the past 2 decades the global healthcare ecosystem has changed significantly, while UK healthcare staffing policies have not kept pace with the changes. Today, there is a substantial gap globally in the supply and demand of healthcare professionals. Countries such as India, which traditionally could be relied upon to provide healthcare professionals for NHS England, have changed and the pool of potential Indian recruits have shrunk. Over the past 2 decades, the Indian economy has improved and the nation has developed a number of world-class hospital groups such as Apollo, Fortis and Narayana Health, which offer internationally competitive terms and conditions to Indian doctors and nurses. Increasingly Indian hospitals retain more of the nation’s healthcare professionals, and indeed attract doctors working in the UK and the US to return. Further, NHS England has tended to be staffed on the basis of what successive governments can afford rather than what NHS patients’ actually need.
 
Challenges of planning healthcare needs

Although there is a significant shortage of healthcare professionals in NHS England, it is not altogether clear that, (i) significantly increasing the number of NHS health professionals in the short to medium term will be possible, and (ii) simply increasing staff numbers will improve cancer care. Over the past 2 decades, as technologies and demographics have changed, so the demands on cancer professionals have changed. It is not necessarily the case that the NHS has the right mix of staff with the right mix of skills to deal effectively with changing conditions.  Changing traditional roles rather than simply boosting numbers might contribute more to reducing cancer mortality rates and improving the quality of cancer care. Further, it seems reasonable to suggest that, with the aforementioned challenges, a greater proportion of the UK’s annual healthcare spend might be more effective were it directed at cancer prevention rather than “diagnosis and treatment”.
 
Preventing cancer
 
A substantial proportion of cancers can be prevented including cancers caused by tobacco use, heavy consumption of alcohol, and obesity. According to the World Cancer Research Fund about 20% of all cancers diagnosed in the developed world are caused by a combination of excess body weight, physical inactivity, excess alcohol consumption, poor nutrition, and tobacco use, and thus could be prevented. Certain cancers caused by infectious agents such as the human papilloma virus (HPV), hepatitis C, (HCV), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can be prevented by human behavioural changes, vaccination or treatment of the infection. Further, many of the 5m skin cancer cases worldwide (16,000 in the UK), which are diagnosed annually could be prevented by protecting skin from excessive sun exposure and not using indoor tanning machines.
 
Cancer screening
 
Screening is known to reduce the mortality of cancers of the breast, colon, rectum, cervix, and lung. Screening can help colorectal and cervical cancers by allowing for the detection and removal of pre-cancerous lesions. Screening also provides an opportunity for detecting some cancers early when treatment is less expensive and more likely to be successful. Early diagnosis is an important factor in improving cancer outcomes. Currently, the UK offers 3 national screening programs for bowel, breast and cervical cancer. Notwithstanding, recent reports suggest that these programs are not being fully utilised. For example, in 2017 the percentage of women taking up invitations for breast cancer screening was at the lowest level in a decade, dropping to 71%. Over 1.2m women in the UK (25% of the eligible population) did not take up their invitation for cervical screening. Further, a heightened awareness of changes in certain parts of the body, such as the breast, skin, eyes and genitalia may also result in the early detection of cancer.
 
Reconciling bureaucracy with innovation
 
We have described how UK cancer strategies are determined from the top. Cancer care professionals conform to internationally accepted standard processes, which facilitate and reinforce control. ‘Control’ and ‘conformism’ are in the DNA of cancer healthcare professionals and provide the cultural norms of NHS cancer care programs. NHS managers ensure conformance to clinical procedures, medications, targets, budgets, and quality care standards. This describes a classic “bureaucracy”, which is the technology of control and conformism, and the 70-year old command and control structure of NHS England. While control, alignment, discipline and accountability are very important to cancer care programs, innovation is equally important. If NHS England’s cancer mortality rates are to be compatible with those of other European healthcare systems we will have to find a way to reconcile the benefits of bureaucracy - precision, consistency, and predictability - while making the architecture and culture of our cancer care programs more innovative and more compatible with the demands of rapidly evolving 21st century science and technology.
 
Takeaways

Cancer is a vexed and profoundly challenging disorder. As soon as you read about a breakthrough you have news that the cancer has outwitted the scientists, hence the name, “the emperor of all maladies”. Cancer care in the UK has improved, but still the majority of British cancer patients would faire significantly better in other European countries. When reflecting on the myriad of cancer strategies, reports, and taskforces over the past 2 decade you cannot help but think that NHS England suffers from an element of bureaucratic inertia: the inevitable tendency of the NHS to perpetuate its established procedures and modus operandi, even if they do not reduce cancer mortality rates to those experienced by other European nations. The UK policy debate to resolve this problem tends to be dominated by “more”: more money, more doctors, more nurses. Historically this has provided successive governments with a “get-out-of-jail-card” because circumstances meant that the NHS could always provide more. This is not the case today. The global healthcare ecosystem has changed quicker than UK cancer strategies and quicker than structural changes in the nation’s healthcare system. Improving cancer care in the UK will require more than inertia projects. It will require more innovation, more long-term planning, more courage from policy makers, more attention to actual patients’ needs rather than providing what is politically available. The UK healthcare establishment should be minded of Darwin who suggested that, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
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Excess weight and type-2 diabetes linked to 16% of cancers in the UK

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  • 16% of cancers in the UK are linked to excess weight and type-2 diabetes (T2DM)
  • 62% of adults are overweight or obese in England
  • 4m people are living with T2DM in the UK and another 12m are at increased risk of T2DM
  • Prevalence rates of both obesity and T2DM are rising
  • Ineffective prevention initiatives should be replaced with effective ones if we are to dent the vast and escalating burden of obesity, T2DM and related cancers
  • Public health officials, clinicians and charities need to abandon ineffective inertia projects embrace innovation and look to international best practice 

 
Excess weight and type-2 diabetes linked to 16% of cancers in the UK
 
 
Being overweight and living with type-2 diabetes (T2DM) is a potentially deadly combination because it significantly increases your risk of cancer and contributes to the projected increase in cancer cases and deaths in the UK. Findings of a study published in the February 2018 edition of The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology suggest that a substantial number of UK cancer cases are linked to a combination of excess body mass index (BMI) and T2DM, which here we refer to as diabesity. To lower the growing burden of cancer associated with diabesity, more effective prevention strategies will be required. To achieve this, clinicians, public health officials and charities will need to reappraise their current projects, innovate, and learn from international best practice. 
 
BMI, obesity and T2DM defined
 
Body mass index (BMI) is a simple index of weight-for-height that is commonly used to classify overweight and obesity in adults. It is a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of his height in meters (kg/m2). Overweight is a BMI greater than or equal to 25; and obesity is a BMI greater than or equal to 30. T2DM is a long-term metabolic disorder characterized by high blood glucose (sugar), insulin resistance, and relative lack of insulin. Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas, which is used by the body to manage glucose levels in the blood and helps the body to use glucose for energy.

 In this Commentary
 
This Commentary describes the findings of a study reported in a 2018 edition of The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, which suggests that current initiatives to prevent and reduce the burden of diabesity are ineffective. Previous Commentaries have described the Mexican Casalud and the Oklahoma City projects, which have successfully reduced obesity and type-2 diabetes (T2DM). These represent innovative international best practice, which have been largely gone unnoticed by the UK’S diabetes establishment. Also, we describe findings of a study published in the May 2017 edition of Scientific Reports, which suggests that although Google trend data can detect early signs of diabetes, they are underutilized by traditional diabetes surveillance models. The prevalence of diabesity in the UK is significant and growing so fast that public health officials, clinicians and charities will have to replace failing inertia projects with more effective ones if they are to dent the growing burden of cancer linked to a combination of obesity and T2DM.
 
The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology study
 
A comparative risk assessment study published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology was carried out by researchers from Imperial College London, Kent University and the World Health Organization. It suggests that in 2012, 5.6% of all cancers worldwide were linked to the combined effect of obesity and diabetes, which corresponded to about 0.8m new cancer cases. 25% of these account for liver cancer in men, and 38% account for endometrial cancer, which affects the lining of the womb in women.
 
Obesity T2DM and cancer
 
There is a close association between obesity and T2DM. The likelihood and severity of T2DM are closely linked with BMI. If you are obese your risk of T2DM is 7-times greater than someone with a healthy weight. If you are overweight your risk of T2DM is 3-times greater. Whilst it is known that the distribution of body fat is a significant determinant of increased risk of T2DM, the precise mechanism of association remains unclear. It is also uncertain why not all people who are obese develop T2DM and why not all people with T2DM are either overweight or obese. Also, the link between obesity and some cancers is well established. More recently, researchers have linked diabetes to several cancers, including liver, pancreatic and breast cancer. The 2018 Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology study described in this Commentary is the first time anyone has calculated the combined effect of excess BMI and T2DM on cancer worldwide.
 
Findings

According to the Lancet study’s findings, cancers diagnosed in 2012, which are linked to diabesity are almost twice as common in women (496,700 cases) as men (295,900 cases). The combination of excess BMI and T2DM risk factors in women accounts for the highest proportion of breast and endometrial cancer: about 30% and 38% respectively. In men, the combination accounts for the highest proportion of liver and colorectal cancers. Overall, the biggest proportion of cancers linked to diabesity is found in high income western nations, such as the UK (38.2% of 792,600 cancer cases diagnosed in 2012), followed by east and southeast Asia (24.1%). 16.4% of cases of cancer in men and 15% in women in high income western nations are linked to being overweight, compared to 2.7% and 3% respectively in south Asia. Researchers suggest that on current trends, the number of cancers linked to a combination of excess BMI and T2DM could increase by 30% by 2035, which would take the worldwide total of these cancers from 5.6% to 7.35%. 
Uneven prevalence of cancers resulting from diabesity

While cancers associated with diabesity are a relatively small percentage of the total - the global 5.6% masks wide national variations of cancer prevalence resulting from diabesity. For example, in high income western nations, such as the UK, 16% of cancers are linked to excess BMI and T2DM, which suggests a potentially significant trend. As known cancer risk factors such as smoking tobacco have declined in the UK and other wealthy nations, so diabesity has increased as a significant risk factor.
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According to Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard,of Imperial College London and lead author of the 2018 Lancet study, the prevalence of cancer linked to excess BMI and diabetes is, “particularly alarming when considering the high and increasing cost of cancer and metabolic diseases. As the prevalence of these cancer risk factors increases, clinical and public health efforts should focus on identifying optimal preventive and screening measures for whole populations and individual patients”.
 
Risks of cancer and their vast and escalating costs

Clinicians, public health officials and charities are mindful of the vast and escalating risks of excess BMI and T2DM on cancer. According to Diabetes UK, 4.5m people are living with diabetes in the UK, 90% of these have T2DM, and another 11.9m are at increased risk of T2DM. Research published in the May 2016 edition of the British Medical Journal reports that prevalent cases of T2DM in the UK more than doubled between 2000 and 2013: from 2.39% to 5.32%, while the number of incident cases increased more steadily.
 
According to a 2014 report by Public Health England entitled “Adult obesity and type-2 diabetes”, the direct annual economic cost of patient care for people living with T2DM in 2011 was £8.8bn; the indirect costs, such as lost production, were about £13bn, and prescribing for diabetes accounted for 9.3% of the total cost of prescribing in 2012-13. The Report concludes, “the rising prevalence of obesity in adults has led, and will continue to lead, to a rise in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes. This is likely to result in increased associated health complications and premature mortality . . . Modelled projections indicate that NHS and wider costs to society associated with overweight, obesity and type 2 diabetes will rise dramatically in the next few decades”.
 
Preventing excess BMI and T2DM as a way to reduce the burden of cancer

Because of the increasing prevalence of diabesity clinicians, healthcare providers and charities have invested substantially in programs to prevent obesity and T2DM. Notwithstanding, the UK’s record of reducing the burden of these disorders is poor. According to the authors of The Lancet study, “Population-based strategies to prevent diabetes and high BMI have great potential impact … but have so far often failed.” Despite an annual NHS spend of £14bn on diabetes care, and over £20m spent annually by Diabetes UK  on “managing diabetes, transforming care, prevention, understanding and support”, over the past 10 years people with diabetes have increased by 60%.
 
Healthier You a national diabetes prevention program

Healthier You, a joint venture between NHS England, Public Health England and Diabetes UK was launched in 2016 and aims to deliver evidence-based behaviour change interventions at scale to people at high risk of T2DM to support them in reducing their risk. In December 2017, an interim analysis of the program’s performance was published in the journal Diabetic Medicine. Findings suggest that Healthier You has achieved higher than anticipated numbers of referrals: 49% as opposed to 40% projected, and the, “characteristics of attendees suggest that the programme is reaching those who are both at greater risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and who typically access healthcare less effectively.”
 
Cautionary note
 
Notwithstanding, the study’s authors conclude with a cautionary note and say that when data become available from the 2019 National Diabetes Audit (NDA) they will be better positioned to assess the program’s performance. Specifically, whether Healthier You participants changed their weight and HbAc1 levels over time. (HbA1c is a blood test that indicates blood glucose levels and is the main way T2DM is diagnosed). We are mindful that earlier National UK Diabetes Audits suggest there are significant challenges associated with incomplete and inconsistent patient data at the primary care level, and also significant variation in diabetes care across the country. It seems reasonable to assume that incomplete and inconsistent data will present analytical challenges.
 
Outcomes as key performance indicators
 
Notwithstanding, the authors of the interim appraisal of Healthier You are right to attempt to link key performance indicators (KPI) with patient outcomes rather than provider activities, which tend to be the preferred performance indicators used by public officials, clinicians and charities engaged in preventing obesity and T2DM. At the population level, there is a dearth of data that associate specific prevention programs with the reduction of the prevalence of obesity and T2DM. Until actual patient outcomes become the key performance indicators, it seems reasonable to suggest that inertia rather than innovation in prevention and care of T2DM and obesity will prevail, and year-on-year the burden of diabesity and associated cancers will continue to increase.
 
Casalud

Two significant and effective innovations to reduce excess BMI and T2DM, which have been largely ignored by the UK’s diabetes establishment are the Casalud and Oklahoma City projects. Casalud is a nation-wide online continuing medical education program launched in Mexico in 2008, which has demonstrated influence on the quality of healthcare, and subsequent influence on patient knowledge, disease self-management, and disease biomarkers. Casalud provides mHealth tools and technical support systems to re-engineer how primary care is delivered in Seguro Popular (Mexico’s equivalent to NHS England) primary health clinics.  By focusing on prevention and using technology, Casalud has increased the number of diabetes screenings and improved clinical infrastructure. An appraisal of the program published in the October 2017 edition of Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity suggests that the Casalud program successfully impacts changes in obesity and T2DM self-management at the primary care level throughout the country.
 
Oklahoma city’s transformation

Oklahoma is a city of about 550,000 people. In 2007, it was dubbed America’s “fast food capital" and “fattest city". A decade later, the city was in the middle of a transformation. While the state still has among the highest adult obesity rates in the nation – climbing from 32.2% to 33.9% between 2012 and 2015 – obesity rates in Oklahoma City dropped from 31.8% to 29.5% during that time frame, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The city’s transformation started with city’s Mayor Mick Cornett. Cornett, who has been in office since 2004, brought notoriety to the city’s public health efforts beginning at the end of 2007 with the goal to collectively lose 1m pounds. The people of Oklahoma City met that goal in 2012, but have not slowed down their efforts. What began as a campaign to promote healthy eating and exercise became a citywide initiative to, "rebuild the built environment and to build the city around people instead of cars," Cornett says.
 
Underutilized data that detect early people at risk of T2DM
 
Findings of a study published in the May 2017 edition of Scientific Reports suggest an innovative way to improve early diagnosis of excess BMI and T2DM when the diseases are easier and less costly to treat, but so far these data are underutilised. The study reports that increasingly people are searching the Internet to assess their health and records of these activities represent an important source of data about population health and early detection of T2DM. The study based on data from the 2015 Digital Health Record produced by Push Doctor, a UK based online company, which has over 7,000 primary care clinicians available for online video consultations. According to the study, which is based on 61m Google searches and a survey of 1,013 adults, 1 in 5 people chose self-diagnosis online rather than a consultation with their primary care doctor. The study makes use of commercially available geodemographic datasets, which combine marketing records with a number of databases in order to extract T2DM candidate risk variables. It then compares temporal relationships with the search keywords used to describe early symptoms of the T2DM on Google. Researchers suggest that Google Trends can detect early signs of T2DM by monitoring combinations of keywords, associated with searches. Notwithstanding, the value of these data they are underutilized by clinicians, public health officials and charities engaged in reducing the risks of excess BMI and T2DM, which can lead to cancer.
 
Takeaways

Over the past decade, NHS England has spent more than £100bn on diabetes treatment alone, and Diabetes UK has spent some £200m on education and awareness programmes, yet diabetes in the UK has increased by 60%. 90% of diabetes cases are T2DM, which is closely linked to obesity. The combination of excess BMI and T2DM causes some 16% of all cancers in the UK. The burden of these diseases destroys the lives of millions and cost billions. It is imperative that this vast and escalating burden is dented. This will not be achieved if clinicians, public health officials and charities continue with ineffective inertia projects. They will need innovate and embrace best practice if they are to prevent and reduce the vast and escalating burden of excess BMI, T2DM and cancer.
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CRISPR positioned to eliminate human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer

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Cervarix
cervical cancer
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CRISPR
Gardasil
gene editing
gynaecological cancers
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Human Papilloma Virus
  • A 2018 clinical study in China is the first to use CRISPR to edit cells inside the human body in an attempt to eliminate the human papilloma virus (HPV) and is hugely significant for millions of women
  • Nearly all sexually active people get an HPV virus at some point in their lives and persistent high-risk HPV infections are the main cause of cervical cancer
  • Respectively 34,800 and 256,000 women in the UK and US live with cervical cancer and each year about 3,200 and 12,200 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed in the UK and US respectively nearly all related to HPV
  • Cervical cancer is increasing in older women not eligible for the HPV vaccine and not availing themselves of Pap test screening programs
  • A new study suggests that cervical cancer mortality among older women could increase by 150% in the next 20 years

CRISPR positioned to eliminate human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer

January 2018 marked the beginning of the first CRISPR clinical study to attempt to edit cells while they are in the body of women in the hope to eliminate the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is the main cause of cervical cancer. The study, led by Zheng Hu of the First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, is the first to edit human cells while inside the body. Zheng Hu will apply a gel that carries the necessary DNA coding for the CRISPR machinery to the cervixes of 60 women between the ages of 18 and 50. The study’s aim is to prevent cervical cancers by targeting and destroying the HPV genes that cause tumor growth while leaving the DNA of normal cells untouched. Current estimates suggest that every year 527,624 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and 265,672 die from the disease. Zheng Hu’s study is expected to be completed by November 2018 and findings reported in January 2019.
 
In this Commentary

This Commentary describes the Chinese CRISPR study and the etiology and epidemiology of cervical cancer. It also describes the current cervical cancer vaccination possibilities and the challenges they face. Further, the significance of the Chinese study is demonstrated by an English study, published in December 2017 in the Lancet Public Health, which warns that although HPV vaccination programs have significantly reduced the incidence of cervical cancer among young women, the incidence of the disease is increasing significantly among older women who do not qualify for the cervical cancer vaccine, and fail to avail themselves of regular Pap tests (A Pap test is a simple, quick and essentially painless screening procedure for cancer or precancer of the uterine cervix). The latter part of the Commentary describes advances that CRISPR technology has made over the past decade as well as describing its main ethical and technical challenges.
 
Human papilloma virus (HPV)

There are over 200 different types of HPV related viruses. Viruses are the etiological agents of approximately 15% of human cancers worldwide, and high-risk HPVs are responsible for nearly 5% of cancers worldwide. It is estimated that about 75% of the reproductive-age population has been infected with 1 or 2 types of genital HPV. About 79m Americans are currently infected with HPV, and about 14m people become newly infected each year. The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 90 and 80% of sexually active American men and women respectively will be infected with at least one type of HPV at some point in their lives. Most HPV infections are harmless, they last no more than 1 to 2 years, and usually the body clears the infections on its own. More than 40 HPV types can be easily spread by anal, oral and vaginal sex. About 12 HPV types are high risk, and it is estimated these persist in only about 1% of women. However, a central component of the association between HPV and cervical carcinogenesis is the ability of HPV to persist in the lower genital tract for long periods without being cleared. These persistent high-risk types of HPV can lead to cell changes, which if untreated, may progress to cancer. Other HPV types are responsible for genital warts, which are not sexually transmitted.
 
Etiology of cervical cancer
 
 “The way that the HPV causes cancer informs us about how cancer occurs in other settings. Virus particles insert foreign DNA into a person’s normal cells. This virus then turns off the “off-switch” and allows the oncogenes [Genes that can transform a cell into a tumor cell] to progress unchecked and create an oncogenic virus. So, in this case the 'insult' is known: it’s an HPV virus. However, in many circumstances we’re not sure what that initial switch is that upsets the balance between a tumor suppressor and an oncogene,” says Whitfield Growdon, of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at the Harvard University Medical School: see video below:
 
 
HPV and cervical cancer

The association of risk with sexual behavior has been suggested since the mid-19th century, but the central causal role of HPV infection was identified just 40 years ago. HPV infection is the main etiologic agent of cervical cancer. 99% of cervical cancer cases are linked to genital infection with HPV and it is the most common viral infection of the reproductive tract. HPV types 16 and 18 are responsible for about 70% of all cervical cancer cases worldwide. Further, there is growing evidence to suggest that HPV also is a relevant factor in other anogenital cancers (anus, penis, vagina and vulva) as well as head and neck cancers. The importance of prevention and cervical cytological screening was established in the second half of the 20th century, which preceded and even advanced etiologic understanding.
 
Epidemiology of cervical cancer
 
Cervical cancer is one of the most common types of gynecological malignancies worldwide. It ranks as the 4th most frequent cancer among women in the World, and the 2nd most common female cancer in women between 15 and 44. According to the World Health Organization there were some 630m cases of HPV infections in 2012, and 190m of these led to over 0.5m new diagnoses of cervical cancer. The World has a population of some 2,784m women aged 15 and older who are at risk of developing cervical cancer. Each year about 3,200 and 12,200 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed in the UK and US respectively; nearly all related to HPV. There is estimated to be 34,800 and 256,000 women in the UK and US respectively living with cervical cancer. Each year some 890 and 4,200 women die from cervical in the UK and US respectively.
 
HPV vaccines
 
HPV vaccines, which prevent certain types of HPV infections, are now available to females up to the age of 26, and have the potential to reduce the incidence of cervical and other anogenital cancers. “Vaccinations work by using your own immune system against foreign pathogens such as viruses and bacteria. Vaccination against some high risk sub-types of cancer-causing HPV viruses is one of the most meaningful interventions we’ve had since the development of the Pap test,” says Growdon: see video below.
 
 
Gardasil and Cervarix

Gardasil, an HPV vaccine developed by Merck & Co., and licenced by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006, was the first HPV vaccine recommended for girls before their 15th birthday, and can also be used for boys. In 2008 Cervarix, an HPV vaccine manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline,  was introduced into the UK’s national immunization program for girls between 12 and 13. Both vaccines have very high efficacy and are equally effective to immunise against HPV types 16 and 18, which are estimated to cause 70% of cervical cancer cases. Both vaccines significantly improve the outlook for cervical cancer among women living in countries where it is routinely administered to girls before they become sexually active. “Both Gardasil and Cervarix vaccines have been shown to be incredibly effective at preventing the development of high-grade dysplasia, which we know, if left unchecked, would turn into cervical cancer,” says Growdon: see video above.

Gardasil also protects against HPV types 6 and 11, which can cause genital warts in both men and women. Second-generation vaccines are under development to broaden protection against HPV. In 2014 the FDA approved Gardasil 9, an enhanced vaccine, which adds protection against an additional 5 HPV types that cause approximately 20% of cervical cancers.
Global challenge

Despite the availability of prophylactic vaccines, HPVs remain a major global health challenge due to inadequate vaccine availability and vaccination coverage. Despite the promise, vaccine uptake has been variable in developed nations, and limited in developing nations, which are most in need. The available vaccines are expensive, require a cold chain to protect their quality, and are administered in 2 to 3 doses spanning several months. Thus, for a variety of practical and societal reasons (e.g., opposition to vaccination of young girls against a sexually transmitted agent, fear of vaccination), coverage, particularly in the US has been lower than would be optimal from a public health perspective.
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Success among young women

Notwithstanding, a study referred to above and published in the Lancet Public Health suggests cervical cancer cases are expected to fall by 75% among young women for whom vaccination is now the norm. Death from cervical cancer among the generation who were 17 or younger in 2008 when the UK vaccination program was introduced is expected to virtually disappear.
 
Challenges for older women

Notwithstanding the success of HPV vaccines for young women, there are continuing challenges for older women who, because of their age, do not qualify for HPV vaccines, and do not attend their Pap screening test when invited. “Pap tests involve scraping the cervix on the outside for cells, which then udergo microscopic examination. Today this is carried out by a computer. Further examination is carried out by a cytopathologist who determines status . . . . . . . . . . Pap tests do not diagnose cancer, but tell you whether you are at high risk of either having pre-cancerous or cancerous cells. Actual diagnosis of cervical cancer involves a colposcopy. This is a simple procedure, which uses a specific type of microscope called a colposcope to look directly into the cervix, magnify its appearance, and helps to take biopsies of abnormal areas,” says Growdon: see videos below.
 

What is a Pap smear test?


Diagnostic tests for cervical cancer
 
Older women and Pap tests

Pap tests, which are offered by NHS England to women between 25 and 64, is the most effective way of preventing cervical cancer; yet data show that in 2016 there was a significant drop in Pap test screening as women’s age increased. If such screening covered 85% of women, it is estimated that it would reduce deaths from cervical cancer by 27% in 5 years, and the diagnosis of new cases of cervical cancer by 14% in 1 year. According to the authors of the 2017 Lancet study, “The risk of acquiring an HPV infection that will progress to cancer has increased in unvaccinated individuals born since 1960, suggesting that current screening coverage is not sufficient to maintain – much less reduce – cervical cancer incidence in the next 20 years.”
 
Cervical cancer projected to increase in older women

Over the next 2 decades, diagnoses of cervical cancer in women between 50 and 64 are projected to increase by 62%, which could increase mortality from the disease by nearly 150%. “The main reason for this is that the population is ageing and women currently 25-40 will not benefit from vaccination – and they are in the age range where the likelihood of getting an HPV infection is quite high,” saidAlejandra Castanon one of the authors of the Lancet study.
 
Chinese study extends CRISPR technology

The Chinese study mentioned above to eliminate the HPV virus employs an innovative extension of CRISPR, which is a ‘game-changing’ technology. Over the past decade CRISPR has become a significant tool for genetic manipulation in biomedical research and biotechnology.  
 
CRISPR and genome editing

CRISPR is a complex system that can recognize and cut DNA sequences in order to provide organisms a strong defence against attacks and make them immune from further assaults. CRISPR has been adapted for both in vitro and in vivo use in eukaryotic cells to perform highly selective gene silencing or editing. Eukaryotic cells are those that contain a nucleus surrounded by a membrane and whose DNA is bound together by proteins into chromosomes.  CRISPRs are specialized stretches of DNA, and "CRISPR-Cas9" provides a powerful tool for precision editing due to its highly efficient targeting of specific DNA sequences in a genome, and has become the standard for genetic editing. Cas9 protein is an enzyme that acts like a pair of molecular scissors capable of cutting strands of DNA. The genomes of organisms encode messages and instructions within their DNA sequences. Genome editing involves changing those sequences, thereby changing the messages. This is achieved by making a break in the DNA, and tricking a cell's natural DNA repair mechanisms to make desired changes; CRISPR-Cas9 provides a means to do this. The technology’s ease of use and low cost have made it popular among the scientific community, and the possibility of its use as a clinical treatment in several genetically derived pathologies has rapidly spread its significance worldwide.
 
Changing ethical concerns

Despite CRISPRS promise there have been significant ethical concerns to genome editing, which center around human germline editing. This is because germline editing entails deliberately changing the genes passed on to children and future generations; in other words, creating genetically modified people. The debate about genome editing is not a new one, but has regained attention following the discovery that CRISPR has the potential to make such editing more accurate and even "easy" in comparison to older technologies. As of 2014, there were about 40 countries that discouraged or banned research on germline editing, including 15 nations in Western Europe. There is also an international effort, launched in December 2015 at the International Summit on Human Gene Editing and led by the US, UK, and China, to harmonize regulation of the application of genome editing technologies. 
 
After initially being opposed to using CRISPR in humans, in June 2016, the US National Institutes of Health advisory panel approved the technology for a study designed to target three types of cancer and funded by the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017 the UK approved the use of CRISPR for research in healthy human embryos. 
 
Off-target effects

Soon after scientists reported that CRISPR can edit DNA in 2012, experts raised concerns about “off-target effects,” meaning either CRISPR changes a gene scientist did not want changed or it fails to change a gene that they do. Although CRISPR-Cas9 is known for its precision a study, published in 2017 in the journal Nature Methods, raised concerns that because of the potential for “off-target effects” testing CRISPR in humans may be premature. Non-intended consequenes can happen because one molecule in the CRISPR system acts like a “molecular bloodhound”, searching the genome until it finds a match to its own sequence of  genetic letters; but there are 6bn genetic letters of the human genome, which suggests that there may be more than one match. Scientists anticipate and plan for this by using a computer algorithm to predict where such flaws might occur, then they search those areas to see if such off-target effects did occur. Notwithstanding such procedures and despite CRISPR’s precision, substantial efforts still are required to make the technology a common device safe for human clinical treatments.
 
Advances using CRISPR
 
The first clinical study using CRISPR began in October 2016 at the West China Hospital in Chengdu. Researchers, led by oncologist Lu You from Sichuan University, removed immune cells from the blood of a person with lung cancer, used CRISPR to disable a gene called PD-1, and then returned the cells to the body. This study is part of a much larger CRISPR genome editing revolution. Today, there are about 20 human clinical studies taking place using CRISPR technology most of which are in China. Different studies focus on different cancers including, breast, bladder, oesophageal, kidney, and prostate cancers. Further, a 2017 paper published in the journal Cell describes a number of innovative ways CRISPR being used; including editing cells while inside the body.
 
Takeaways
 
Despite the efficacy of HPV vaccines, immunization against cervical cancer still has significant challenges. Vaccines only target young people before they become sexually active, and are not recommended for slightly older and sexually active women. There is an urgent and growing concern about older women therefore who were not eligible for HPV vaccination, and are not availing themselves of regular Pap tests, and in whom the incidence of cervical cancer is increasing significantly. This makes Zheng Hu’s clinical study extremely important because it holds out the potential to substantially dent this large and rapidly increasing burden of cervical cancer.
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