Age no barrier to a 140,000-word thesis, says retired Illawarra health boss, 80

At 80, as many of his peers go gentle into pursuits associated with the dying light, Dr King has completed a 140,000-word thesis, which passed with flying colours and only three detected typos.

The research, through the University of NSW, also has real-world application, with its potential to spare people unnecessary, intimate encounters with the colonoscope, and to improve waiting times for the procedure.

Dr King worked for 42 years as a colorectal surgeon at hospitals in St George and Hurstville and spent 10 years as the prominent chair of the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District's board before his retirement in 2021.

As a PhD candidate, he brought with him an unrivalled bank of patient data, which he has now mined for research poised to challenge Australia's existing, broad-brush bowel cancer screening program.

Existing practice calls for screening every 3-5 years for people aged 45-75 who are considered at increased risk of bowel cancer (such as those with a family history).

"For some time now, a lot of people in this field have been seeking to find a way of telling at the beginning of this 30-year period who is at risk, and who is not at risk," Dr King told the Mercury.

"It's not been possible to do that because ... it's not ethical to say to half the group that you're just going to follow them [without screening] and see what happens, because we know 20 per cent of them will develop bowel cancer.

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"[As a clinician] I had an information system that tracked what I did in colonoscopy - what was the indication, and what were the findings.

"Out of that ... it's been possible to identify the changes in the first 5-10 years that predict which group they fall into - those at high risk of bowel cancer, and those at 'community' risk.

"If you can tell in the early part of the 30 years who has a high personal risk ... then the other 80 per cent of people can be managed with community screening, which is much less intensive, much less of a burden on the patient and on the health system."

With collaborators, Dr King is in the process of writing papers to submit to medical journals. There are also more findings - unrelated to the original study - to be extrapolated from the data.

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He said the National Health and Medical Research Council and Bowel Cancer Australia, would likely look into the findings, "and if they think it's appropriate, will recommend adjustments [to screening practices]".

Dr King paid tribute to his wife Pamela King - a long-serving nurse who orchestrated the information system used to gather the data - and to his thesis supervisors "for all their help in turning a very large amount of data into something sensible".

He said he hadn't delayed his retirement - he was living it.

"My definition of retirement is that you work because you want to, not because you have to," Dr King said.

"I've got lots of other things in the pipeline."

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