Majority early-stage breast cancer patients to be long-term survivors: Study

A research found that the majority of women with early-stage breast cancer could expect to become "long-term survivors".The large-scale research discovered that for certain women, the chance of dying within five years is as low as 0.2 per cent.

Since the 1990s, doctors observed that there has been a significant increase in the percentage of women who survive this disease, as reported by the Guardian.

The study's sponsor, Cancer Research UK, hailed the results as "heartwarming" and comforting for breast cancer patients.

Researchers followed the survival rates of 500,000 English women who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 1993 and 2015 under the direction of the University of Oxford academics.

The authors primarily examined instances of breast cancer that had not spread beyond the breast.

Five years after diagnosis, when the chance of dying from breast cancer was discovered to be highest, they monitored the patients to determine their risk of mortality.

In contrast to women diagnosed in the 1990s, those diagnosed between 2010 and 2015 had a 66 per centlower chance of passing away from the condition within five years.

When a woman was diagnosed between 1993 and 1999, her probability of dyingwithin five years of diagnosis was 14.4 per cent.

Dr Carolyn Taylor, professor of oncology at Oxford PopulationHealthand lead author of the paper who spoke to the Guardian said,“Our study is good news for the overwhelming majority of women diagnosed with early breast cancer today because their prognosis has improved so much."

“Their risk of dying from their breast cancer in the first five years after diagnosis is now fiveper cent.It can also be used to estimate risk for individual women in the clinic. Our study shows that prognosis after a diagnosis of early breast cancer varies widely, but patients and clinicians can use these results to predict accurate prognosis moving forward," he said.

“In the future, further research may be able to reduce the breast cancer death rates for women diagnosed with early breast cancer even more,” he added.

Factors responsible for increase in survival rates

New treatments, enhanced radiation, improved breast screening, and research that has found diverse breast cancer features are some probable factors that might contribute to the increase in survival rates, according to specialists.

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As perscientists at Cancer Research UK, this was the first research of this magnitude with a long follow-up to chart the features of the patients and their cancer in addition to tracking which women died from their condition.

The organisation said it meant physicians could use it to accurately predict women's prognoses.

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