It is common for both the public and clinicians to misconstrue cancer as a disease of the very young or of the relatively old, as if those in the prime of their youth are somehow spared. I too succumbed to this fallacy until just over a year ago, when a tearful phone conversation confirmed the worst: at the cusp of adulthood, my friend’s life was cruelly interrupted.

Suddenly, the long-held assumption of the immortality of those closest to me – and even myself – crumbled. It is in this context that I began to question: why is cancer in youth and young adulthood only vaguely in the public consciousness? Is there any concrete action to be taken in the hope of prevention? How would I possibly be able to identify if I were ill? I suspect that these queries, once brought to the forefront of the mind, actually unify a vast majority of us. The reality is that our teenage demographic, while not impervious to cancer, is largely unaware of its signs and symptoms.

In the quest to reverse such ignorance, organisations such as the Cancer Awareness in Teenagers and Young People Society (CATS) have recently begun to flourish in Cambridge. The advice is underpinned by a simple, but effective principle: if you know what to look for, you’re more likely to spot an abnormality that could be cancer. You could even save a life, be it your own or that of a loved one. There are, in fact, five key signs of cancer indication in young people, all of which are persistent and unexplained for the sufferer. They encompass recurrent pain; the emergence of unexplained lumps or bumps; significant weight loss without conscious effort; extreme tiredness and alterations in the appearance of moles.

A further facet of the identification problem, however, is that most of us will all too readily attribute some of these symptoms to other aspects of our life. How easy it would be to denounce any suspicion with ‘it’s Cambridge – of course I’m exhausted’, or ‘I simply do not have the hours in the day to visit the GP’.

The impetus to avoid doing so stems from the fact that the implications of the symptoms prove far from easy to spot. On average, six cases of cancer in teenagers are diagnosed every day in the UK. In light of such a statistic, the ignorance of symptoms proves all but bliss. Indeed, the pressing importance of seeking a medical opinion if any of the above symptoms are noticed is re-affirmed by the fact that cancer incidence rates have increased by seven per cent over the last decade in Great Britain. Such a fact serves not to scare-monger, but rather to elucidate that while the chances of developing cancer may be small overall, they are neither non-existent nor inconsequential.

The main pathologies our age-group are most susceptible to are lymphoma and leukaemia which account for more than half of all cancers diagnosed in young people. With regard to these in particular, the benefits of heightened youth consciousness extend from recognition in-self to the therapy of others. Since the principal treatment for such conditions is a bone marrow transplant, it is important to urge those between 16-30 years old to sign up to the bone marrow register. If one day, it is your name that flashes across a computer screen as a donor match, the procedure that ensues once again defies popular belief. 90 per cent of donations are enacted quickly and painlessly, in a peripheral blood stem cell collection largely analogous to donating blood; a minor 10 percent involve accruing bone marrow from the process. At the culmination of the process, a person with a life as rich as any of our own is given a second chance.

I carry with me my friend’s boyish smile, and am ultimately affronted with the fact that one in two of us will be diagnosed with some form of cancer during our lifetimes. Fostering an awareness that cancer could be a more tangible prospect in our youthful innocence than accepted stereotypes would have us believe, is a valuable endeavour. Still, despair should not prevail. There are in our grasp meaningful opportunities to redefine cancer comprehension among our generation, pre-empting improved outcomes for patients present and future. Let’s seize them.

For more information and to join the UK’s largest bone marrow register, visit www.anthonynolan.org.