The restaurant critic Giles Coren has revealed he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Writing in the Times, Coren said he had been told the tumour would need monitoring but “no treatment would be necessary for the moment”.
In his column, the 55-year-old recounted a call from a urology nurse on Wednesday explaining that “some cancer” had been found in a biopsy of tissue samples recently taken from his prostate, “but less than a millimetre in just three of the 21 samples”.
His Gleason score – a commonly used grading system for prostate cancer – was “the lowest possible rating for a malign tumour”, he wrote.
Prostate cancer is now the most commonly diagnosed cancer in England, Prostate Cancer UK reported earlier this week. There were 55,033 diagnoses of the disease in 2023, compared with 47,526 for breast cancer.
Coren’s urologist urged him to have the biopsy taken after Coren requested a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test from his GP a couple of years ago, along with his annual cholesterol check, and discovered his PSA level was raised.
The NHS offers PSA tests to men aged 50 and over who request them, while men who have a family history of prostate cancer can speak with their GP about having a test from the age of 45.
Coren wrote: “I had only asked for the test because such good work has been done lately to raise awareness, by people like Stephen Fry and Bill Turnbull – and latterly poor Chris Hoy – and now here I was with a score of four, where higher than 2.5 is considered abnormal and facing imminent death.”
This assertion was refuted by his GP, who told him: “It’s not imminent death. All men get it, if they live long enough. It’s a slow cancer. Most men die with it, not of it. And a raised PSA doesn’t necessarily mean cancer anyway.”
Coren, an award-winning food and drink writer, has appeared on BBC shows including The Supersizers, Our Food and the F-Word with Gordon Ramsay. He has been writing for the Times since 2002.
He is the son of the English journalist and humourist Alan Coren and the elder brother of Victoria Coren Mitchell.
