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What does the Information section contain?

  • Background
    General information about the prostate gland and prostate cancer can be found in this section which is a great place to start if you are new to the subject.
  • Risks
    This section contains information about the causes and risk factors of prostate cancer, as well as advice on prevention.
  • Diagnosis
    Information about diagnosis and screening techniques can be found in this section, alongside details of the symptoms of prostate cancer.
  • Treatments
    Descriptions of the different treatments, how well they work and what side effects they have can be found in this section.
  • Health service
    What to expect from the health services in caring for people with prostate cancer.
  • Support
    Information written to support people living with prostate cancer (patients, carers and family members) is available here.
  • Research
    Getting involved in health care research and health service development is widely encouraged and you can find out more in this section.

How does the Information section work?

All links included are catalogued by our team of information scientists. Each link is assigned major and minor subject codes, based on the content found within the information on the external web site.

Let's go through an example to see how this works:

  • A section of information on the MacMillan Cancer Support web site is entitled 'Treatment of early prostate cancer' (open this example in a new window)
  • The information is assigned major codes for:
    • 'What treatments are there?'
    • 'Localised early stage non-metastatic prostate cancer'
  • The information is assigned minor codes for:
    • 'Diagnosis'
    • 'Watchful waiting'
    • 'Surgery'
    • 'Radiotherapy'
    • 'Hormone therapy'
    • 'Radical prostatectomy and radiotherapy'
    • 'New treatments'

Browsing to the 'Treatments' section in the Information section will present you with a list of results which have been indexed under the general term 'Treatments' (i.e. those records which are about general treatment). Our example therefore does not appear in this top level list.

Browsing to the 'Treatments' section and selecting the 'What treatments are there?' subsection will retrieve our example in a more specific set of results.

Why have we built the site in this way?

Designing the site in this way means that your results will always be focused and relevant to the question in hand, because we have always catalogued the information as specifically as possible.

What's more, because results are also graded by quality, it's extremely easy to quickly find the most usable and reliable information that exists to answer your question.