Although we found no evidence that CRP, ESR or PV were superior to one another in relation to overall cancer detection, this may not be true for all types of cancer; for example recent studies have shown that ESR and PV are superior to CRP for myeloma diagnosis.32 As myeloma is known to have a strong association with raised inflammatory markers, it is perhaps surprising that myeloma comprised only small proportion of the overall cancers (<3%); when these were excluded from the analysis the incidence of cancer in the raised inflammatory marker cohort was 3.45%, compared to 3.53% overall. The gene discussed is CRP; the disease is plasma cell myeloma.