X-Message-Number: 18806
From: "Daniel Crevier" <>
Subject: cancer survival rates.
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 17:21:08 -0500

To follow up on my earlier posting, a little googling revealed that overall
5-year cancer survival rates went from slightly under 40% in the early
1960s, as quoted in a government report at site
http://seer.cancer.gov/Publications/raterisk/rates29.html
to 62% today, as per a newspaper article on the Life Extension Foundation
site at
http://www.lef.org/news/disease/2002/01/17/CGZT/0000-37358-KEYWORD.Missing.h
tml

The latter source even mentions that "The outlook probably is even rosier
for people diagnosed today because the survival rates being reported now are
based on treatments that took place eight years ago, and many advances have
been made since then. "

That's a 22% increase in 40 years, or about half a percent per year. At that
rate it would take about 80 years for the survival rate to reach 100%. But
we can surmise that as we finally start to understand the mechanisms of
cancer, progress should accelerate.

Daniel Crevier

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