A new article in US News & World Report says blood cancer patients are living longer today than they were in the 1980s.
Well I should hope so.
The study, to be published in the journal Cancer in November, examined data taken from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database—a US cancer registry. More to the point, they compared patients with five types of blood cancer from two five-year stretches: 1981-1985 and 2001-2005. Here's what they found (expressed in ten-year survival rates):
- Hodgkin's: Up almost 13 percent (80.4 % to 93.4 %)
- Non-Hodgkin's: Up over 20 percent (55.6 % to 76.2 %)
- Acute lymphoblastic leukemia: Up over 21 percent (30.5 % to 52.1 %)
- Acute myeloblastic leukemia: Up almost 30 percent (15.2 % to 45.1 %)
- Chronic myelocytic leukemia: Up 74.5 percent (0 % to 74.5 %)
The good news for all lymphoma patients is that survival rates have been rising pretty steadily in that time—as opposed to the acute leukemias, as those 10-year survival rates haven't changed much since the late 1990s.
