US Cancer Survival Rates Rise Significantly Over Past Five Decades, Report Shows

Seventy-one percent of people with cancer in the United States now live for at least five years after their diagnosis, according to a recent report released in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That figure marks a major increase from 49% in the late 1970s, as highlighted by an analysis from the American Association for Cancer Research.

Lung Cancer And Leukaemia

Lung cancer survival rates show striking gains, moving from an average of 13% for people diagnosed between 1975 and 1979 up to 29% for the period between 2016 and 2022. Rebecca Siegel, a cancer epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, Georgia, notes that this jump stems from better surgery and radiation treatments, alongside new medicines that target specific mutations or help the immune system fight tumours. Meanwhile, the five-year survival rate for lymphoid leukaemia in children and adolescents up to age 19 has jumped from 57% to 90%, driven by the careful tweaking of dosages and timings for existing treatments rather than a brand-new therapy.

Other Malignancies

Other notable highlights include liver cancer, where the five-year survival rate has tripled to 22% since the mid-1990s. Multiple myeloma, which is a type of blood cancer, has also seen drastic survival increases due partly to drugs that harness the immune system. Michel Coleman, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says global statistics broadly show this same trend toward greater survival, even though some stubborn malignancies continue to vex researchers.

Context

Cancer survival statistics are tracked over five-year periods because doctors use this milestone to measure the success of treatments and the likelihood of disease recurrence. Medical researchers often study long-term data trends across decades to understand how public health interventions, early screening programmes, and new drug developments gradually change patient outcomes on a population scale.