A new study from a prominent cancer research centre in the U.S. suggests that while breast cancer was once a virtual death sentence, it is now often a survivable disease.
The study found that 60 years ago, a woman diagnosed with any form of breast cancer had just a 25 per cent chance of living 10 years. These days, the survival rate is more than 75 per cent.
The study focused only at women who were treated at the University of Texas's MD Anderson Cancer Center, so it may not reflect changes in survival elsewhere.
But MD Anderson is a massive cancer centre that has maintained a comprehensive database since its inception almost 70 years ago. This study looked at the health records of 56,864 breast cancer patients between 1944 and 2004.
The research noted increases in both five- and 10-year survival at every breast cancer stage, in every decade studied.
Patients with small tumours that had not spread and who could be treated with surgery and radiation, have typically fared the best. In the 1944-1955 period, 55 per cent of those patients lived 10 years or longer. By 2004, that had risen to more than 86 per cent.
Tumours that have spread through the breast are more challenging to treat. In the 1944-1955 period, just 16 per cent of these patients were alive 10 years later. Even in the 1985-1994 period, just 57 per cent of patients were alive 10 years later. But by 2004, the survival rate was more than 74 per cent.
The worst prognosis is for stage 4 disease, when cancer cells have spread to other parts of the body. In 1944, medical oncologist Dr. Aman Buzdar said, just three per cent of those patients lived 10 years. Now 22 per cent do.
Buzdar presented the data in advance of the 2010 Breast Cancer Symposium, an event sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Buzdar's research team credits much of the increased survival on:
- advances in screening for disease detection
- better surgical techniques
- refinement of chemotherapy, specifically the incorporation of anthracyclines, taxanes and biologics, and newer hormonal agents like aromatase inhibitors
"This dramatic shift is a true testament to not only breast cancer's overall research and clinical milestones - improved chemotherapies, addition of new drugs, improvement of endocrine therapies and more recently biologics - but to the appropriate and disciplined approach and utilization of these therapies," Buzdar said in a statement.
He noted that while the findings on increased survival are encouraging, there is still more research to be done.
"Now, we need to turn our attention to the refinement of breast cancer therapies, with a goal of further decreasing risk of recurrence and death for our high-risk early stage breast cancer patients, and maintaining the control of disease in those with metastatic disease," said Buzdar.
