Prostate cancer is the most common male cancer in the UK. But that statistic can be beaten.

The Observer, May 2005

There are several ways a middle-aged man may find he has a problem with his prostate gland - difficulty in peeing, getting up a lot in the night - but the way Tony Elliott found out was rather different. In mid-January, he attended the opening of the Turks: Journey of a Thousand Years exhibition at the Royal Academy with his wife Janey. As the founder and publisher of Time Out, he gets asked to these sorts of events regularly and he knew many of the other guests, or thought he did.
'It was very crowded,' he remembers, 'and the rooms were quite dark and claustrophobic, and I began to feel slightly odd.' Then he went outside, and wanted to introduce someone to Alan Yentob. The BBC executive is an old friend, as is the person he wanted to introduce. Elliott began, 'Do you know ...' but then his mind went blank. The same thing happened when he tried to tell his wife about the conversation he had just had with Tessa Jowell, but he couldn't remember her name either.
Elliott, who is 58, went to see his doctor the following day, the first visit for several years. His doctor thought it was probably just a lack of blood getting to the head, and arranged for a specialist to check his heart; he quickly found that everything was fine. He also did all the usual urine and blood samples, including one for something called PSA, which is used to monitor the health of the prostate gland.
Elliott knew a small amount about the prostate, such as where it was (at the exit of the bladder and surrounding the urethra) and its size (described variously as the size of a hazelnut or a walnut), and he had had a PSA test several years before. That result was relatively low - about 2, he thinks, on a scale where a measurement below 3.5 is considered acceptable for a man of his age.

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