The Breast Cancer Survival Rate

The breast cancer survival rate is what makes it a scary disease. Here are a few of those facts and figures. Knowing them should help remove some of the fear of the unknown.

First of all, while they say that about one woman in eight will be diagnosed with breast cancer, that's not quite the same as saying that every eighth woman you meet will have it. This is an example of mixing up lifetime statistics with actual cases. When figures say that one in eight women will have breast cancer, it's a scary number. As far as that number goes, it's technically correct.

In the US, there are over 250,000 cases per year. This includes both invasive cases and non-invasive ones.

What the statistics don't tell you.

However, it can be broken down a bit further. First, breast cancer incidence rates have dropped by about 3.5% per year during this decade. This is because hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been cut back. While further studies are being done, if you're not on HRT, your risk factor is probably lower.

Also, breast cancer risk increases with age. The older you are, the likelier it is that you'll get breast cancer. There are other risk factors, but this is the main reason why doctors are trying to screen early. They want to get as much of a lead time on a breast cancer case as they can.

While it's true that we can expect over 40,000 breast cancer deaths in a year, most of those deaths are for cases of breast cancer detected years ago.

Breast cancer is a treatable condition. Radiation therapy, removing tumors surgically, and chemotherapy are all options.

The earlier it's detected, the likelier it is that it can be treated successfully. The good news is that breast cancer survival rates have climbed steadily since the 1990s. This is mostly due to better detection methods and treatment options.

New findings and improvements can help.

How important are those new findings? There are over 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the US alone. That's roughly ten year's worth of new breast cancer cases. That number is rising. Breast cancer also has a fairly solid five year survival rate. This means that women who get treated are likely to survive for five years after treatment. Breast cancer also has an excellent ten year survival rate.

As to the actual survival numbers, it's about 80% for five year survival rates after diagnosis. It's about 72% for a ten year survival rate. These numbers are also corrected for the age of the patient.

While not much of a surprise to most, getting older means you're likelier to die from other causes as well. Those deaths need to be accounted for in overall survival rates. Some experts are hopeful that the five year survival rate may exceed 90% by 2015.

This is because of new treatment methods and earlier detection. These survival numbers come from breast cancer patients who were diagnosed prior to 2002. Even the change in hormone replacement therapy mentioned earlier could skew them, let alone better treatment and earlier detections we have now.

Take breast cancer seriously, even though you have a good chance of survival.

Just because the five and ten year Breast Cancer survival rates have risen doesn't mean breast cancer is a walk in the park. The only cancer that kills women more frequently than breast cancer is lung cancer.

Unlike lung cancer, which is closely tied to external causes and triggers, like smoking, it's looking more and more likely that breast cancer is tied to genetics. Women who have a daughter, sibling or parent who has breast cancer are likelier to experience breast cancer.

Women who have a mutation in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene markers are almost six times more likely to develop breast cancer than a women pulled randomly from the population. They are also likelier to be diagnosed with it earlier (before the age of 50).

Above and beyond genes, the two risk factors that seem to come out most often are age and gender. The older you are, the likelier it is that you'll develop breast cancer. And, by far, women are much likelier to develop breast cancer than men (though it does happen for men as well.)