21/05/2025
It’s never too young to get tested. It’s just a simple blood test.
If anyone here needs a hero today, we bring you Ryan Murphy. 💪
He’s standing up with us to call for a nationwide prostate cancer testing program, writing an op-ed in today’s Australian called ‘The Hunger Games of prostate cancer diagnosis’:
“All around the Capitol, tributes are flying for former US president Joe Biden, shockingly diagnosed with aggressive, late-stage prostate cancer at 82 years old.
If the most watched, most guarded man in the world can be surprised by a late diagnosis, it begs the question: Is what we are doing to detect this disease working?
I was recently diagnosed myself, at the age of 36. I’m late stage two, caught just in time.
Only one Queenslander aged 35-39 is diagnosed each year. It seems I’ve been volunteered as tribute.
I only know because my GP had added a PSA (prostate specific antigen) test to a routine blood panel. He did so against Medicare guidelines, which say I should first be screened in 14 years’ time.
After diagnosis I began to voraciously consume information about prostate cancer, night and day. I reached out to other men who had been diagnosed to learn more about the disease. In doing so I joined the great underground railroad of prostate cancer survivorship where I was introduced to one survivor, then another, and another.
For some, battling this cancer was a walk in the park. For others, it was anything but. But what struck me more than their bravery or candour was just how random and arbitrary it was for them to find this cancer in the first place.
Some had family history and monitored their PSA closely. Others ignored symptoms for years and hold deep regret. Some were dismissed by their GP. One man did everything right, then lost his pathology form. Mine sat in the glovebox for three months, so I get it.
This is the Hunger Games model we have contrived for Australia’s most common cancer in men.
One in five Australian men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Yet finding it still depends on a long chain of events playing out just right – having a GP, knowing your family history, getting a PSA test, interpreting it correctly, and receiving timely follow-up.
If you are a man in Australia you must navigate this game wholly on your own, and if you don’t play the game just right you will lose your life.
Under 50? You lose.
No GP? You lose.
Don’t know your family history? You lose.
GP doesn’t believe in PSA testing? You lose.
No follow-up on a rising PSA? You lose.
Move interstate and your records disappear? You lose.
Strangely, with other cancers we have a much more civilised approach. Women are invited into a national breast screening program from age 50, and it reduces mortality by 42 per cent in the screened group. Cervical screening has been so successful that 70 per cent of cervical cancer diagnoses now come from women who were never screened. Australians turning 45 can request a free bowel cancer test, and at 50 the kit arrives in the mail automatically.
But for prostate cancer, you don’t even get a pamphlet. Or a text message.”
Read the full story here: https://pcfau.org/ryanmurphy
Our thanks to Ryan for his courageous leadership, and to his wife Emma Yabsley and their daughter Elodie for standing with him, and us. 💙
