The prognosis for those diagnosed with breast cancer today is much more favorable than it was twenty years ago: deaths have dropped by two-thirds.
The number of patients who die from a diagnosis of breast cancer is now two-thirds lower than in the 1990s: more and more women who receive this news are destined for a life free from cancer. It is the excellent news recorded in a study published on British Medical Journal and conducted on over half a million women in the UK.
Twenty years of progress. The analysis coordinated by Carolyn Taylor, an oncologist at the University of Oxford, involved 512,447 women who had been diagnosed with early invasive breast cancer (spreading only to breast tissue and axillary lymph nodes) from January 1993 to December 2015. The patients were followed up until December 2020. The scientists estimated that in people who had discovered breast cancer between 1993 and 1999, the risk of dying in the first 5 years of diagnosis was 14.4%; in women who received this news between 2010 and 2015, the risk of death was 4.9%.
A big leap forward. Deaths from breast cancer therefore fell by two-thirds in two years, in each age group and both in patients who discovered they had cancer through routine screening tests and in others: a welcome surprise also for the researchers, who knew there had been a marked improvement but hadn’t yet figured out its size.
Culture, prevention, cures. At the moment it is not possible to say what this marked improvement is due to: whether to greater awareness in the population of the risks of breast cancer and how to prevent it, whether to a greater diffusion of routine screening campaigns, offered free of charge in the United Kingdom to more patients, or whether to an overall improvement in the treatments available to patients on their way to recovery.
Because you need to know. Studies like this are important for understanding how to target research funding and public health interventions in the sector. According to the report data The numbers of cancer in Italy 2020 edited by, among others, the Italian Association of Cancer Registries (AIRTUM) and the Italian Association of Medical Oncology (AIOM) reported by AIRC, breast cancer is the most frequent neoplasm in Italy and represents 30.3 percent of all cancers affecting women. Prevention is mainly based on adherence to national screening programs (to learn more) and on maintaining a healthy lifestyle.