Then & Now FROM 1993-2023
Top Santé launched 30 years ago with the March 1993 issue, which featured the results of a UK-wide survey covering attitudes to health and wellbeing. At the end of 2022, we asked similar questions to compare results three decades on. This issue, we focus on one of the illnesses that most worried us back then and still does today: cancer.
HOW IS YOUR health? What illnesses, if any, worry you? Have your eating habits changed for the better? Do you sleep well? Are you anxious? We posed these and many more questions to our newsletter subscribers last year, to compare the results to a health questionnaire that was included in the launch issue of Top Santé, 30 years ago.
Back in 1993 we wrote that if people had been asked in 1893, a century earlier, which disease they feared most, the answer might well have been syphilis or tuberculosis. ‘These diseases did indeed kill many people, but above all they were feared because they were mysterious, untreatable and caused lingering pain, often with horrible complications,’ we said in our launch issue.
But in 1993, the disease feared most was cancer. Among 35- to 44-yearolds, more people were afraid of cancer than strokes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, arthritis and rheumatism, HIV/AIDS, and going deaf or blind put together.
In the early 90s, one-in-three Brits would develop some form of cancer in their lives, and around one-in-five would die from it. That meant more than 250,000 people developing cancer in the UK each year in the early 90s. Among women, breast cancer was most common in 1993, and lung cancer for men. Worryingly, the British rate of death from breast cancer was the highest in the world in the early 1990s, and the number of women in their 30s and 40s developing the disease was increasing.
Our 1993 report also stated: ‘The UK has a frighteningly high rate of premature death from common cancers, notably of the lungs, breasts in women and colon. While surgery and drugs are sometimes successful treatments, modern medicine has done little to help reduce the death rates from these and other forms of cancer.’
Are we faring any better in 2023? Surely 30 years on, with all the cancer charities, fundraising efforts and advances in technology, fewer people are dying from cancer?
Today, there are about 375,000 new cancer cases diagnosed in the UK every year, which is roughly 1,000 a day, according to Cancer Research UK* (cancerresearchuk.org). The increase in cases could be due to rising population numbers and better diagnosis. Importantly, cancer survival is improving and has doubled in the past 40 years in the UK. Half of those diagnosed with cancer in England and Wales will survive their disease for 10 year
