Cancer, how does stress affect you? Do sweets make it worse? The most frequently asked questions about cancer (with expert answers)

No, the likelihood of dying from cancer has steadily decreased over the past few decades. Recovering from cancer or living with a tumor for years, as happens with other chronic diseases, is now possible. It happens more and more often, even in Italy, where there are over three and a half million people living after a cancer diagnosis. Particularly for some types of malignancies (such as those of the breast, prostate or thyroid) over 90% of patients are alive five years after diagnosis and on average this “fateful threshold” is reached by 65% ​​of patients. At the end of the 1970s, just over 30% of people affected by cancer defeated the disease and in the 1990s almost 47%. There are forms of cancer that even today remain very often lethal and, in any case, each patient is a story in itself: his chances of recovering definitively or how long he will remain alive depend on many variables, such as the precise type of neoplasm, whether it is aggressive or not, whether it has already spread to other organs or not, the general state of health of the person, the availability of effective treatments, and more.