Appearing on the Leaders Council Podcast, award-winning author and preventative medicine expert, Dr Paul Jenkins, talks about how in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, preventative healthcare is being held in higher regard. He also discusses how the trial of the Galleri blood test could be an exciting development in the field, but professionals have reason to remain cautious.
Disease prevention is a topic of personal importance for Dr Jenkins. Now a consultant physician with over 30 years of experience, his passion for the subject stems from as early as his days as a junior doctor. Having been struck by the devastating impact disease was having on his patients, which he strongly felt could have been avoided with earlier detection, he felt compelled to drive prevention forward rather than just treatment, and this determination has persisted throughout hid many years working as a consultant on hospital wards.
It was also on the basis of trying to promote preventative medicine among a wider group of healthcare professionals that Dr Jenkins founded his own company, Echelon Health, which is now the world’s leading provider of medical assessments that are capable of detecting up to 95 per cent of early disease.
Dr Jenkins said on the podcast: “I would think that we all accept the idea that prevention is better than cure when it comes to disease. That is the central tenet that we teach medical students almost on the first day of their studies in medicine. But unfortunately, it often seems to be forgotten.
“Quite often as a result, a busy and stretched NHS is finding itself dealing with more late-stage disease with stronger symptoms, and it can become an overwhelming situation.”
With the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic having significantly stretched NHS resources and created a significant backlog in elective care, Dr Jenkins believes that the medical profession and global population must now focus more greatly on preventative measures.
“The pandemic has made us very aware of our own mortality, and it has focused our minds on how precious life can be and how quickly it can change. For many people, the emphasis now lies in preventative medicine - so for the individual that means ensuring a better quality of life, better work-life balance, healthier lifestyles and protecting our health which is our most valuable possession. So, we’re turning toward prevention as individuals, and in the context of medicine part of that will of course involve looking at better screening for certain conditions such as cancers so that we can detect them more quickly and intervene before it reaches late-stage development.”
Paying tribute to the efforts of the NHS in juggling the Covid-19 response and the ever-growing routine treatment backlog, Dr Jenkins added: “I think that the NHS has done a phenomenal job navigating the biggest pandemic we can remember having been on its knees throughout. It has been a difficult time for many of my colleagues on the frontline and the vaccination programme has been truly unprecedented. But now we find ourselves playing catch-up as attention starts to turn back toward those diseases that are not linked to Covid. Some things by default will have been missed during this last two years with routine treatment and screening stopping because the cake is only so big in all countries. It is a challenge for healthcare across the world.”
Recent months have come as an important period for preventative care, with NHS England launching back in September 2021 the world’s largest trial of the Galleri blood test, a revolutionary new test capable of detecting more than 50 forms of cancer before symptoms appear. NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard went as far as saying that the “quick and simple” test could “mark the beginning of a revolution in cancer detection and treatment”, while health secretary Sajid Javid was clear that the ability to ensure fewer people require treatment for advanced cancer would significantly improve patient care and be crucial in bringing down the backlog.
Although these sentiments of optimism were echoed by Dr Jenkins, he chose to adopt a more cautious tone about how Galleri could eventually be used in a clinical setting, given concerns over its efficacy in detecting some very early-stage cancers.
He explained: “The Galleri test has attracted a great deal of positive publicity. It is a very exciting development and the premise of it is that many cancers are now known to shed small amounts of abnormal DNA into the bloodstream and through the very modern and vast improvements of detection technology, we can use the test to find that DNA where it is present and detect abnormalities. So, if you can do a simple test like that to screen for abnormal DNA, you can detect the cancers you want to detect at an earlier stage and prevent it from developing.
“However, the caveat of this is that the small and early cancers, or indeed those abnormalities that have not yet become a cancer, don't really secrete this DNA. So, the trials will need to clarify a lot in this area for us to gauge how we can use Galleri in a clinical setting. If one were to look at some of the current studies that have been published and have gotten a lot of people excited, it is only really 16-17 per cent of these very early cancers yet to become an abnormality and secrete the DNA that were detected by the test [as of October 26, 2021].
“This, of course, meant that a lot of these tests were detecting later stage cancers where you’re entering more into disease management territory rather than being able to cure. That’s the main concern about this test and indeed a lot of other screening tests: for early-stage disease where medical professionals and patients will have the most benefit, the tests may not be as effective as we wish in detecting them and enabling that early intervention.”
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
