The Eurocare report, the biggest study on the survival of people with cancerdefine in Europe, shows that the percentage of patients being fully cured of cancer had risen appreciably in the last decade.
But a negative trend has also been observed. According to the report, published in the European Journal of Cancer, there are ample dissimilarities between countries, with Scotland and England lagging behind in some of the top survival rates.
Cancer claims millions of lives each year. There is no definitive cure for this disease. But with the emergence of technology in the last fifty years, novel discoveries are being made in the field of cancer treatment daily.
For the latest study, researchers utilised the data from cancer registries to determine cancer survival between 1988 and 1999. They focused mainly on three types of cancers and discovered a noticeable increase in the survival rates of patients.
It was found that between the time period of 1988-90 and 1997-99, approximately six to eight percent of patients were successfully treated for lung cancer across 23 European countries.
Professor Michel Coleman, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, agreed that cancer survival rates in UK are improving for sure. He was quoted as saying, “The improvements are down to the better organisation in the management of cancer patients, as well as better surgery and more widespread use of radiotherapy.”
For stomach cancers, the cure rate went up from 15 to 18 per cent during the same time. Also, colorectal cancers went up from 42 per cent to 49 per cent.
But the wide disparity in survival rates is an issue of concern. For instance, the proportion of patients cured for lung cancer in Scotland was 5 per cent. This is less when compared to 10 per cent for France and Spain. However, it is more than the 4 per cent reported in countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic.
In the case of breast cancer, 66 per cent of Scottish women were estimated to be treated. This is in contrast to 73 per cent in countries including Finland, France and Spain. The lowest rate was 55 per cent in countries including Slovenia and Poland.
Cancer services have improved significantly in England which in turn has increased the life expectancy of patients affected by cancer. However there is a lot of room for improvement since there are some problems that are responsible for the major variation in cancer survival rates here.
Firstly, there has always been a general notion that drugs which can increase the life span of cancer patients are not readily available in England. Experts also agree that cancer services do remain underfunded.
Another regular problem of the cancer services prevalent in England is that tumors tend to be detected quite late. This makes the patient lose any chance of being treated successfully.
The Cancer Research UK has also put forth some heartening facts that bring a ray of hope for patients suffering from cancer. These are:
•Half of people detected with cancer now live for more than five years.
•Over the past 30 years, the average ten-year cancer survival rate has doubled.
•More than seventy percent of children with cancer are now successfully treated.
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