Health: Cancer

Lord Patel Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes a good point. When recording the cause of death on a medical certificate of cause of death, doctors are required to start with the immediate, direct cause of death and then go back through the sequence of events or conditions that led to death until they reach the one that started the fatal sequence. This initiating condition will usually be selected as the underlying cause of death according to the International Classification of Diseases coding. However, that does not mean that someone with a primary cause of death of cancer will not have pneumonia, or whatever it happens to be, recorded somewhere on the death certificate.

[Lord Patel]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that as we progress with the current research into the molecular tagging of drugs that have the same molecular make-up as the cancer itself and nanomedicine we will be better able to target cancer tissue while leaving normal tissue alone? That will save lives lost to the complications related to treatment.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I agree, and I am confident that over the years ahead we will see a much greater emphasis on stratified medicine, particularly if we can relate treatments to genomic data.