Cancer is no longer a death sentence

According to Charity Cancer Research’s report released yesterday, cancer survival rates have doubled in the past 30 years. A team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that patient with cancer now has a 46.2% chance of being alive ten years after diagnosis compared with 23.6% 30 years ago.

However, survival ranges from just 2.5% for pancreatic cancer to 95% for testicular cancer. Harpal Kumar, cancer charity's chief executive, said improvements in the management of cancer over the last three decades had led to significantly better survival rates.

"We don't generally use an overall survival figure for cancer, partly because it is not a helpful number to individual cancer patients anxious to know their own chances (…) But since the new goals relate to cancer as a whole, we feel it is important to define a simple baseline for watching progress” said Professor Michel Coleman who led the study. In Europe, Britain still trails in terms of cancer survival, despite the recent improvement. "Survival rates for many cancers have been lower in the UK than in many comparable countries. The differences may be less when Eurocare-4 is published later this year - I am hopeful we may have caught up," he added.

"Our goals are as broad as they are ambitious. They recognise the importance of furthering our fundamental biological understanding of cancer while at the same time taking that knowledge out of the lab and turning it into new treatments” Mr. Kumar said. “We read a lot of negative stories about the UK's place in Europe so it's encouraging these figures show such dramatic improvements in cancer survival”. The organisation (Charity Cancer Research UK) wants the Government to increase NHS access to new cancer drugs.

In the UK, 276,678 persons were diagnosed with cancer in 2003. There are more than 200 different types of cancer, but four of them – breast, lung, large bowel (colorectal) and prostate – account for over half of all new cases. One in four (26%) of all deaths are caused by cancer. The Office for National Statistics reported 153,491 cancer deaths in 2005. Cigarette smoking has been identified as the single most important cause of preventable death in the UK. Overall, one third of all deaths from cancer, including around 80% of lung cancer deaths, are linked to tobacco smoking.

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