A Cause for Celebration

The improvement in the cancer survival rates recorded in Britain over the past three decades is quite simply astonishing. Thirty years ago a patient diagnosed with cancer had a 23.6 per cent chance of being alive after 10 years. Today they would have at least a 46.2 per cent chance of surviving that long. And a significant proportion of this improvement in life expectancy has been registered in the decade leading up to 2001. There is every reason to believe this encouraging trend will continue.

That should be cause for celebration. We tend to be critical of the National Health Service, often with good reason. But this is one area where we should acknowledge that our public health system has improved. There are several reasons why. A combination of improved screening programmes and greater public awareness of the symptoms has resulted in earlier detection of cancer. If diagnosed in the early stages, there is a far higher chance of successful treatment. On the treatment side, there has been a greater use of specialist surgery in the NHS and advances in chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Greater collaboration between research charities, universities, industry and the NHS have also helped to get potential treatments from the lab to the clinic.

But these figures do not tell the whole story. The overall survivability rate is rather meaningless. Survival rates vary widely between different forms of cancer. For instance, some 95 per cent of patients survive testicular cancer. But only 2.5 per cent survive pancreatic cancer. Two-thirds of patients survive breast cancer. But there has been no improvement in the survivability of lung cancer over the past 30 years. A patient’s chances of living still depend heavily on which strain of the disease they develop. There is also a statistical quirk in these figures. Because people are generally diagnosed earlier than in the past they are often registered as surviving longer, even though their life may not be prolonged.

The other caution to bear in mind is that we still lag behind the rest of Europe in terms of cancer survival rates. Britain has fewer cancer specialists. And people in Britain still tend to present their symptoms later than abroad. Despite the improvements, at present only about 45 per cent of cases are diagnosed at a stage when treatment is effective.

Cancer is becoming less like a death sentence and more like a serious, but manageable, illness. The improvement has been dramatic and heartening. But much remains to be done. We must not allow what was once an atmosphere of despair give way to one of complacency.

(c) 2007 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.