Cancer is still “the big C” but not quite as fearsome as before, a newly published review of 20 years of treating the disease indicates.
For the thousands of people with cancer and their families, there are many positives to glean from the report from the National Cancer Registry.
Although the incidence of cancer is increasing, this is largely due to better and earlier detection of the disease. Meanwhile, deaths from cancer dropped consistently over the period 1994 to 2012, mainly thanks to improved treatment, and there are more cancer survivors than ever.
Over 122,000 people who contracted cancer in the past 20 years are alive today, and 94,000 of these have survived at least 10 years with the disease.
While this is welcome news, it rightly notes “the growing population of cancer survivors has implications for health service provision in the decades ahead”.
The five-year survival rates for all invasive cancers jumped from 45 per cent for patients diagnosed in 1994-1999, to 59 per cent during 2006-2011.
If you had breast cancer, your chances of survival increased from 72 per cent to 81 per cent. The improvement for prostate cancer was even better, from 69 per cent to 91 per cent.
Even in the case of tumours affecting internal organs, which tend to be harder to treat, there were significant improvements from a low base. The five-year survival rate for cancers of the pancreas grew from 6 per cent to 9 per cent, and lung cancer survival increased from 10 per cent to 15 per cent.
The bad news is that Irish cancer rates are generally higher than the European average, as improvements in our services have failed to keep pace with progress elsewhere in the EU.
The incidence of the disease is 10 per cent higher than the EU average for men and 16 per cent higher for women. Mortality is 14 per cent higher for women but 9 per cent lower for men.
Black spots
Other black spots are increases in the incidence of and deaths from lung cancer and melanomas, high mortality from pancreatic cancer and low treatment rates among older patients.
Ireland has the worst survival rates in Europe for cancer of the ovaries and fallopian tubes, and below average rates for cervical, breast and stomach cancer. The incidence of lung cancer is falling among men but rising among women, reflecting changing smoking patterns from decades earlier.
The report credits the rise in prostate cancer to large-scale prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing of men not showing symptoms. The number of PSA tests increased five-fold between 1995 and 2004. Mortality rates have declined by 2.6 per cent a year since 2001.
On average, about 36,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year, with over half of all cases involving the four major malignancies – prostate, breast, colorectal and lung.
The risk of dying from cancer is about one in 10 for women and one in eight for men. Lung cancer was the single most common cause of cancer death, with about 1,780 deaths each year, one-fifth of all cancer deaths.