Massive medical breakthroughs mean cancer is no longer a guaranteed ‘death sentence’, top experts say.
Data shows that survival rates have skyrocketed over the past 50 years.
Only one in four men diagnosed with prostate cancer in the 1970s would be lucky enough to live into the next decade.
Today, the reverse is true: 75 percent of men diagnosed with the disease are still alive ten years later, figures show.
Survival improvements have also been recorded for pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms, due to medical advances, earlier diagnoses and better quality care.
While the level of progress for cancer survival has been rapid for some forms of the disease, such as for breast and prostate cancer, others, such as those for lung and pancreas, have improved only at a snail’s pace
Pancreatic cancer survival rates have increased fivefold over the past 50 years, from just one in 100 in the 1970s to one in 20 today.
Professor Karol Sikora, a world-renowned oncologist with more than 40 years of experience, told MailOnline that today’s cancer patients have a much greater reason to hold onto hope.
“Less than a third of people diagnosed with cancer were cured, now it’s more than 51 percent,” he said.
“That’s a huge change, in just one generation of doctors.”
He said medical breakthroughs in cancer care to improve patients’ chances were constantly in the making.
“For cancer, the good times are coming … everything gets better year after year, decade after decade,” he said.
“It is no longer the death sentence that some patients think it is.”
Professor Sikora’s comments come after a major study from the University of Oxford found that women diagnosed with breast cancer are two-thirds more likely to survive than their counterparts 20 years ago.
Today, researchers at the University of Oxford found women with the diagnosis between 1993 and 1999 had a 14 percent chance of dying from the disease within the first five years.
Patients diagnosed with early invasive breast cancer between 1993 and 1999 had a 14 percent chance of dying from the disease within five years.
But this risk has now dropped to five percent in people diagnosed between 2010 and 2015.
Even for those patients who received the most devastating diagnosis, Professor Sikora said it was critical not to lose hope as ‘surprises always happen’.
10-year cancer survival rates for common cancers have now reached 50 percent, and experts say further improvements could be made over the next decade
NHS figures show that only 58 per cent of cancer patients started treatment within two months of an urgent GP referral. The NHS’s own rulebook states that at least 85 per cent of cancer patients should be seen within this time frame, but this figure has not been met since December 2015
“For example, pancreatic cancer that has spread to the liver, the chance of living five years if you have that diagnosis is less than 3 percent, but it’s still 3 percent,” he said.
“People still manage to beat all the odds.
“All survival curves, no matter how bad and including pancreatic cancer, have a tail at the end. You have to imagine yourself getting into that tail.”
He said a host of factors are responsible for improved cancer outcomes over the years, but highlighted a change of approach by doctors as key.
“When I started, the focus was always on us eradicating cancer in a patient with blunderbuss chemotherapy, and sometimes people died from it,” he said.
Respected oncologist Professor Karol Sikora told MailOnline that cancer care has progressed in leaps and bounds since he started his career and there was hope in even the grimmest forms of the disease.
“Now chemotherapy is a much gentler affair, we are much better at administering it and much better at dealing with the side effects.
Another factor was diagnostic ability, with high-tech scans now able to pinpoint the disease and show exactly where treatment was needed.
Professor Sikora said: ‘I remember the life-changing moment when I saw a CT scan for the first time in 1974.’
“Before that you couldn’t really see the internal anatomy and suddenly you could see the cancer and the normal tissue around it”
‘And the image we get now is so much better than in 1974.’
Professor Sikora added that the future of cancer care is to learn how to manage a patient’s individual disease and create tailor-made treatments for their disease.
“People can have the same disease and get very different treatments,” he said.
“The future of cancer care is making it even more subtle, by going molecular and analyzing cancer DNA and figuring out how to selectively destroy it.”
General cancer data gives a good approximation of survival rates, but the odds will vary by patient.
Factors such as age, any other health problems and the unique aspects of their illness come into play.
But in all cases, even the most serious ones, Professor Sikora said it was critical not to lose hope.
Other experts have even predicted that some cancers could become extinct in the future thanks to new treatments.
One is cervical cancer thanks to the success of an NHS vaccination programme.
Cases of the disease are down 87 percent as a result of the HPV vaccine.
Among women now in their 20s – the first generation to get the shot – the number of cases has dropped from about 50 a year to just five.
The HPV vaccine prevents infection with the human papillomavirus, a common group of viruses responsible for 90 percent of cervical cancer cases.
Around 167,000 people die from cancer in the UK each year, accounting for around a quarter of all deaths. In the US, the death toll is 599,589.
Despite the positive outlook for the future of cancer care in general, there have been warnings that cancer patients in the UK could face problems getting treatment.
Radiology chiefs warned last week that NHS cancer patients are facing increasing delays due to staff shortages.
A poll of all 60 UK cancer center directors by the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) found that 95 per cent believe staff shortages are leading to longer waiting times for appointments and delays in cancer treatment.
About 88 percent are concerned about shortages affecting the quality of patient care, with the RCR warning that for every four weeks of delay in cancer treatment, the risk of death increases by about 10 percent.
Half of the services surveyed reported ‘frequent delays’ in patients commencing radiotherapy, which occurred every month or most months, while in one in five centers (22 percent) this happened most weeks or every week.
The RCR warned that staffing shortages lead to patients waiting longer than necessary to begin chemotherapy or radiotherapy, while some doctors have to make “tough decisions” about who to prioritize and send patients to different hospitals.
Cancer care was also disrupted during the Covid pandemic.
Controls for the disease effectively came to a halt and patients were delayed in treatment as oncologists were placed on Covid wards and patients told to stay home to protect the NHS, delaying some potential symptoms for medics.
Experts estimate that 40,000 cancers went undiagnosed in the first year of the pandemic alone.