Dame Kelly Holmes has launched a campaign aimed at getting more people to spot the signs of multiple myeloma, the blood cancer that killed her mother Pamela in 2017. The Get Ahead of Multiple Myeloma campaign, run with Johnson & Johnson, is meant to push awareness of a disease that still goes unrecognised far too often.
Holmes is not approaching this as a celebrity lend-a-hand exercise. She lost her mother to the disease, and she is using that experience to make the warning signs harder to miss. Multiple myeloma affects more than 33,000 people in the UK, yet Holmes said there remains a lack of awareness around blood cancers, especially this one.
The former 800m and 1500m Olympic champion, one of Britain’s best-known athletes after her double golds at Athens 2004, said her mother’s diagnosis came as a complete shock to the family. Pamela had been pulled over by the dog a couple of years before she was diagnosed, then kept having back pain. A surgeon who had become friends with her suggested tests, and those tests found multiple myeloma.
Holmes said the disease can be treated, but not cured, and research found that 57% of people surveyed had never heard of it. That gap matters because the early symptoms can look ordinary at first: fatigue, bone pain and recurring infections are all linked to myeloma, and they are easy to dismiss when a patient does not know what to look for.
That is where the campaign’s friction sits. The illness is serious, but it is also a cancer patients can live with for longer when it is identified early enough. Dr Sophie Castell said myeloma is too often missed because the warning signs are misunderstood, and Myeloma UK has created a Symptom Translator to help patients describe what they are feeling to a doctor.
Holmes said what she wanted was simple: to build awareness around a cancer that devastates families. The next question is how far the campaign can reach people before back pain, fatigue or repeated infections are written off as something less dangerous, because for myeloma that is often the difference between a delay and a diagnosis.
