Cancer Survival in US Increasing for Many Cancer Types

By David Douglas

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Aug 22 - Lung cancer survival is not showing improvement, but the outlook has improved in recent years for many other types of cancer, according to an analysis of US data by German researchers.
"By using the most up-to-date available data and the latest developments in techniques of survival analyses, we were able to show that long-term survival expectations are much better for patients with many forms of cancer than previously available survival statistics have shown," lead investigator Dr. Hermann Brenner told Reuters Health.
As reported in the August 1st issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Brenner and colleagues at the German Cancer Researcher Center, Heidelberg examined data on more than 1.4 million US patients who had a first diagnosis of 24 common forms of malignant invasive cancer between 1998 and 2003.
The researchers explain that they calculated relative survival rather than absolute survival. Relative survival is "the ratio of absolute survival of cancer patients divided by the expected survival of a group of persons of the corresponding sex, age and race in the general population."
For 14 of the cancer types, there was a significant improvement in 5-year relative survival. This was strongest for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma followed by kidney cancer and leukemia.
There was also significant improvement in colorectal cancer and malignancies of the prostate and breast. In fact, 5-year relative survival for prostate cancer came close to 100%, and that for breast cancer exceeded 90%.
However, lung cancer relative survival remained essentially unchanged at about 16%, and although there was significant improvement, relative survival for pancreatic cancer reached only about 7%.
The largest contribution to better survival, say the investigators, "comes from improved prognosis of patients with regional tumor spread."
Overall, concluded Dr. Brenner, "this encouraging news should be disclosed to patients, their relatives and clinicians in as timely a manner as possible."
J Clin Oncol 2007;25:3274-3280.