Food critic Giles Coren has revealed he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Disclosing the shock revelation on Friday afternoon, Mr Coren said he learnt of his diagnosis at ‘bang on 9.30am’ on Wednesday.
Mr Coren, 55, wrote in The Times he first got tested a couple of years ago after being alerted to the issue by the work of celebrities including Stephen Fry and Bill Turnbull, who both announced they had been diagnosed with the disease.
He received a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test result of four – with scores higher than 2.5 considered ‘abnormal and facing imminent death’.
But he said his doctor described prostate cancer as a ‘slow cancer’ which ‘all men get’ if they live long enough, but still sent him for an MRI scan.
He refused a biopsy after the result came back inconclusive. But he later agreed to the examination at the Royal Free Hospital in North London after his PSA score increased to six and then seven.
The food critic was this week told doctors had discovered less than a millimetre of cancer in just three of the 21 samples he had provided.
His condition, described as a ‘malign tumour’, would not require treatment for the moment, he was told, but it would be monitored for growth.
Mr Coren has been restaurant critic for The Times since 2002.
His diagnosis came a day after prostate cancer was revealed by his paper to be the most common type of cancer in the UK, having risen 25 per cent in the last five years to overtake breast cancer to the top spot.
According to Cancer Research, more than 55,000 cases were diagnosed in the UK alone each year between 2017 and 2019 – around 150 every day.
It accounts for 28 per cent of all UK cancer cases in males and 14 per cent of cases overall.
It’s most common in males aged 75 to 79, with about a third of all cases diagnosed in males aged over 75, the charity said.