A two-year-old girl diagnosed with a deadly cancer may have been saved by her £3 toothbrush.

Katie Lolley was found to have a rare eye tumour after a flashing light on the Tesco brush alerted her mother to an abnormal white reflection on her eye, reports The Sun.

Retinoblastoma is a rare, rapidly developing tumour which generally affects children under the age of six, and can treble in size in just ten days.

Medics say they had caught it just in time to save Katie’s life, and will reportedly perform an emergency operation to remove her eye.

"If it wasn't for that flashing toothbrush, we may never have seen the tumour - at least, not till it was too late,” said Katie’s mother Rebecca, 29.

"We bought the brush because Katie liked the look of it. It has a bear on it called Billy, and when you press the button on the front, the light flashes for 60 seconds - which is how long kids need to brush for.

"When we got it home, we turned the bathroom lights out so Katie could try it. She loved it but, when I looked at her face in the dark, I could see the lights creating a strange white reflection in one eye. At that point, we decided to take her straight to the hospital."

The most common signs of the tumour’s existence are an abnormal pupil that tends to reflect light rather like a cat's eye, and a squint.

A white, distorted glow in the eye is often seen in photographs taken with a flash.

It was one of these photographs that saved another child’s life in February.

Auxiliary nurse Samantha Rouse discovered her nine-month-old son Jacob had retinoblastoma when his eye appeared white in a photo she took of him.

Having been told by her GP that her son was perfectly healthy, she went back to her GP and insisted something was wrong.

Jacob, who had already lost the sight in his left eye at the time, was receiving chemotherapy and laser treatment every three weeks in a desperate battle to save the sight in his right eye.

Source: Yahoo! News