Ashya King’s parents say he is cancer-free after proton therapy

Brett and Naghmeh King, who were jailed after taking their five-year-old son abroad for treatment, say he has made ‘miracle’ recovery

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The parents of five-year-old Ashya King, who were briefly jailed after taking him from a British hospital and fleeing abroad to seek treatment, have said he is now cancer-free.

Brett and Naghmeh King, who prompted an international police hunt in August when they took Ashya from a Southampton hospital against doctors’ wishes, said their son has made a “miracle” recovery from brain cancer.

The couple, from Southsea, Hants, were found in Spain, where they have a holiday home, and detained for three nights before a high court judge in London granted permission for them to seek proton beam therapy at a centre in Prague in the Czech Republic.

They had feared that conventional radiotherapy, advocated by Ashya’s British doctors to treat his medulloblastoma following surgery, would “kill him or turn him into a vegetable”.

On Monday they said they were absolutely delighted that a recent scan showed no sign of the tumour.

“We have saved his life,” Brett King, 51, told the Sun newspaper, adding: “It justifies everything we went through. If we had left Ashya with the NHS we don’t think he would have survived.”

Naghmeh King, 46, said: “We could not sleep before we got this news – now we are so full of hope for the future. We are jumping up and down with joy. It is a miracle we thought we would never see.”

Ashya has been recovering with his family at their home in Marbella. Before being taken abroad he had undergone surgery to remove the tumour, and was left weak and unable to move.

With doubts about the radiotherapy treatment offered at Southampton General hospital, his parents wanted proton beam therapy, which was not initially offered on the NHS although the health service later agreed to fund it. The treatment targets radiation directly at the tumour, avoiding healthy surrounding tissue, and is said to have a lower risk of side effects.

Staff at the Proton Therapy Centre in Prague, where Ashya had been treated, said they were thrilled to hear the news. Jana Kulhankova, marketing director at the centre, said: “Ashya’s doctor told me last week that Ashya is doing so well that he is able to release him for rehabilitation. If the scans are showing that Ashya is cancer-free, as Mr King says, then we are thrilled. That is what we have worked for.”

At the high court hearing last year doctors in Southampton had said proton beam therapy was unlikely to provide any benefit over standard radiotherapy but that they would not object to Ashya travelling to Prague for such treatment provided a treatment plan was agreed with the parents.

Southampton University Hospital Trust said at the time that the chances of surviving the condition that Ashya has are about 70%-80% after five years with appropriate treatment.

The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has announced a £250m investment in two new proton beam therapy centres expected to open in London and Manchester in 2018.

The NHS currently pays for those deemed appropriate for the therapy to go the United States for treatment. They must be assessed by a panel who may decide patients are not suitable if there is unlikely to be a clinical benefit from the treatment. More than 400 patents have been sent abroad since 2008, mostly children.

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http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/23/ashya-king-now-free-of-cancer-after-proton-therapy-say-parents

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