“Almost half of people who have cancer (more precisely 46% of them) are diagnosed late, which makes the treatment less likely to be successful and which reduces the chances of survival of patients” just declared in a report British Institute for Cancer Research.
This report also estimates that if early diagnoses were made in all hospitals, 5,000 more cancer patients would still be alive 5 years after diagnosis.
“Diagnosing cancer early on, before it has had a chance to spread to other parts of the body, can have a huge effect on survival. Once cancer has spread, it is often more difficult to treat successfully, which means that a person’s chances of survival are much lower and the treatment is also much more expensive “adds the British Institute.
Great Britain, a bad European pupil
For some cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, it is especially difficult to make an early diagnosis because symptoms are often not noticeable only after the tumor has already started to metastasize. The 5-year survival rate is only 4%. Ditto for liver cancer. But for colon cancer, for example, the tumor detected in time heals in 90% of cases.
Although the situation has improved in recent years, Britain ranks among the poor performers in Europe both for cancer diagnosis and for survival rate. Britain’s Institute for Cancer Research study finds that 46% of all cancers diagnosed in England in 2012 were not detected until they reached stage 3 or 4 .
While 93% of cases of melanoma (the most severe form of skin cancer) and 83% of cases of breast cancer were diagnosed at stage 1 or 2, only 23% of cases of lung cancer were detected at early stage, as do 44% of ovarian cancers.