Cancer victims in Northern Ireland have more chance of survival than in the rest of the UK, according to a report.
The Northern Ireland Cancer Registry (NICR) yesterday published the first survey of cancer patients in the North, which also shows men have lower survival rates than women. Some 66 per cent of women were alive one year after diagnoses compared with 58 per cent of men, while after five years 51 per cent of women were alive compared with 38 per cent of men.
An NICR biostatistician, Ms Deirdre Fitzpatrick, said the figures confirmed that rates in the North, which are on a par with the Republic, were better than in the UK. But compared with Europe "it is very low in terms of cancer survival".
Survival rates were found to vary across the range of cancers. The best five-year survival rates were for malignant melanoma (90 per cent) and breast cancer (78 per cent). The worst cancer survival rates were lung (8 per cent), oesophageal (9 per cent) and stomach (17 per cent).
"People may be discovering the cancer at an earlier stage, and if it is caught early enough then you are going to have very high survival rates," she said.
Ms Fitzpatrick suggested different lifestyles might be responsible for the discrepancy between male and female survival rates.
"The type of cancers that men get are more alcohol and smoking-related, and these cancers have very poor survival associated with them. Also, a lot of women tend to pay greater attention to their health than men," she said.