Nearly 14 Million Cancer Survivors in U.S.
March 28, 2013
There are currently 13.7 million cancer survivors in the United States and the number is expected to rise by 31 percent to 18 million by 2022, according to a new report.

"Cancer is often not the immediately fatal diagnosis it often was in the past," said one expert, Dr. William Oh, chief of the division of hematology/oncology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He was not involved in the new report, which comes from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

As the American population gets older, more cancer survivors can be expected, added Julia Rowland, director of the Office of Cancer Survivorship at the U.S. National Cancer Institute. "By 2020, we expect that two-thirds of cancer survivors are going to be aged 65 or older," she said in an AACR news release.

The report, based on an analysis of national data, also found that patients with certain types of cancers account for a large proportion of the survivors. For example, breast cancer patients account for 22 percent of survivors, while prostate cancer survivors account for 20 percent.

People with lung cancer, the second most commonly diagnosed cancer, account for only 3 percent of survivors, according to the report.

"For patients with prostate cancer, we have a nearly 100 percent five-year survival rate, and breast cancer has made tremendous strides as well, with five-year survival rising from 75 percent in 1975 to almost 89 percent in 2012," Rowland said. "However, we clearly need to have better diagnostic tools and better treatments for lung cancer."

Click the link below for the rest of the article!

Posted by Ken at 4:50 AM