Both TV personality Stephen Fry and former BBC Breakfast host Bill Turnbull have recently announced they have been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the most common cancer in men in the UK.

Their cases highlight the importance of knowing about the disease and getting tested.

There are around 40,000 new cases diagnosed every year, but it usually develops slowly so may show no symptoms for many years.

The prostate is a small gland in the pelvis found only in men, which helps to produce semen.

According to NHS Choices, symptoms often only become apparent due to changes to urination, when the prostate is large enough to affect the urethra (the tube that carries urine from the bladder to the penis).

An increased need to urinate, straining while urinating and a feeling that the bladder has not fully emptied are all signs to look out for.

Symptoms that the cancer may have spread include bone and back pain, a loss of appetite, pain in the testicles and unexplained weight loss.

The main methods of detecting it are through blood tests, a physical examination of the prostate, or a biopsy.

If you have symptoms that could be caused by prostate cancer, you should visit your GP.

If detected early and it is not causing symptoms, it may be carefully monitored rather than being treated, as the condition usually progresses very slowly and treatment carries the risk of serious side effects such as erectile dysfunction and incontinence.

Many people live for years without showing symptoms or needing treatment.

Many cases are cured if treatment is chosen, such as by radiotherapy, hormone therapy or surgically removing the prostate - as Fry has had done.

But a lot of men are only diagnosed at a later stage once the cancer has spread and then the prognosis is not so good.

Prostate cancer recently hit the news because it has overtaken breast cancer to become the third biggest cancer killer in the UK, with 11,819 men now dying from it in the UK every year.

But despite this alarming figure, the shift does not represent a worsening situation for prostate cancer and men diagnosed today are two-and-a-half times more likely to live for 10 years or more than if they were diagnosed in 1990.

It is partly because breast cancer death rates have gone down, and also due to an increasing and ageing population that the number of men dying from the disease is rising.

Fry has referred to having a Gleason score of nine, which he said showed the cancer was "clearly an aggressive little bugger".

This score was devised in the 1960s by pathologist Donald Gleason, with those with lower Gleason scores of (2-4) tending to be less aggressive, and higher scores (7-10) more aggressive.