Risk of dying of breast cancer within 5 years has dropped from 15 per cent in the 1990s to five per cent: study
CTV
The risk of dying from breast cancer has fallen dramatically since the 1990s, according to a new study, which found that most women diagnosed with early breast cancer now go on to survive the disease long-term.
The risk of dying from breast cancer has fallen dramatically since the 1990s, according to a new study, which found that most women diagnosed with early breast cancer now go on to survive the disease long-term.
The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal The BMJ, tracked more than 500,000 in England who were diagnosed with early breast cancer between 1993 to 2015.
Participants were followed up until December 2020 in order to track their treatment progress and long-term mortality trends.
What researchers found was that women diagnosed from 1993-1999 had a 14 per cent risk of dying within five years — a number that dropped to only five per cent for women diagnosed between 2010 and 2015.
“Our study is good news for the overwhelming majority of women diagnosed with early breast cancer today because their prognosis has improved so much,” Carolyn Taylor, professor of oncology at Oxford Population Health and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “Their risk of dying from their breast cancer in the first five years after diagnosis is now 5 per cent on average.”
The study looked only at women diagnosed with early invasive breast cancer, meaning that the cancer had not spread past the breast or axillary nodes at the time of diagnosis. It is easiest to fight cancer when it is caught early — when a cancer spreads far beyond the region of the body it originated in, the chances of recovery are lower.
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death from cancer among Canadian women, according to the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS). They estimate that as of 2022, around 28,600 Canadian women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year.
