Cancer Statistics - August 30th, 2009 - 2 Comments

roughly what percentage of americans with cancer, survive?

i know it varies depending on the type of cancer, but what’s a rough percentage of those who survive cancer?

There are 2 comments for this post.

Lucy L on August 30, 2009 10:57 pm

I think you will find that survival statistics will normally be analyzed by type of cancer. A rough number is fairly meaningless. For instance, the survival from certain kinds of skin cancer is almost 100%. On the other hand, liver and pancreatic cancer have very high mortality rates.

Here is a US government web site with survival rates for various types of cancer.
http://surveillance.cancer.gov/statistics/types/survival.html

Note, too, that cancer survival is normally expressed in terms of 5 year, 10 year, etc. survival. So, you need to take into account how many years’ survival you are talking about, as well as the type of cancer.

You could, for instance, combine statistics for 5 year survival for breast and ovarian cancer to get an average. Certainly, that would be more meaningful than averaging the 5 year survival for all types of cancer.
Samantha on October 8, 2009 2:08 pm

Good facts Lucy. May I also point out that survival rates are computed as a group. Meaning these are the rates for a certain group of people. It does not always follow that a person getting cancer that has a 90% survival rate means he or she is already ok. The cancer can vary from person to person so there may be cases that the rate may be different.