Five-year cancer survival in the US rises to 71% — Nature

In the United States, five-year survival among people with cancer has risen from 49% in the late 1970s to 71%, according to a report by the American Association for Cancer Research. Nature reports.

Notable progress in lung cancer treatment

One of the most notable results was an improvement in outcomes for lung cancer. Among people diagnosed with the disease in 1975–1979, an average of 13% lived for at least five years after diagnosis. In the group of patients diagnosed in 2016–2022, this figure reached 29%.

Rebecca Siegel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, linked this to improvements in surgical techniques and radiation therapy, as well as the emergence of medicines that activate the immune system against tumours or target cancer cells with specific mutations. Michel Coleman, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, noted that global statistics generally also show a trend towards increasing survival.

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Childhood leukaemias and liver cancer

Five-year survival among children and adolescents under the age of 19 with lymphoid leukaemia increased from 57% to 90%. According to Siegel, this resulted from collaborative work to adjust the dosages and timing of already available treatments, rather than the emergence of one fundamentally new therapy.

For liver cancer, five-year survival has tripled since the mid-1990s and reached 22%. Outcomes have also increased substantially for patients with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer; this was aided, in particular, by the development of drugs that engage the immune system in fighting the tumour.