It’s a bit more complicated than that. Figures are generally given for people who are still alive a certain number of years after diagnosis. This could be because:
1) The cancer is very slow growing (e.g. many men get prostate cancer but it grows so slowly that they die of something else before the cancer becomes a problem)
2) The cancer is caught and treated
3) The cancer does not return after treatment.
Some cancers can be ‘cured’, but then come back some years later, so they might have been treated but weren’t really cured. Prostate cancer, breast cancer and melanoma (skin cancer) all have fairly good survival rates. A big way to improve your chances of survival are to get anything you’re worried about – any lumps or unusual spots on your skin – checked out quickly by a doctor. They’d much rather rather see you early and tell you that something isn’t cancer than have to deal with you later when you find that you’ve got a cancer and it’s already grown to a large size!
Most cancers that can be cured relatively easily are the ones that are caught the earliest – that’s why there is a lot of advice to check regularly for lumps and bumps and abnormal spots. There are also two main types of cancers – benign and malignant. Benign tumours usually grow withing their own little space and though they can push on other organs they generally don’t spread, and can be quite easily removed with surgery. The other kind, malignant tumour, are much harder to treat as they generally spread quite a lot, and often to other parts of the body making it very serious.
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Paul commented on :
Most cancers that can be cured relatively easily are the ones that are caught the earliest – that’s why there is a lot of advice to check regularly for lumps and bumps and abnormal spots. There are also two main types of cancers – benign and malignant. Benign tumours usually grow withing their own little space and though they can push on other organs they generally don’t spread, and can be quite easily removed with surgery. The other kind, malignant tumour, are much harder to treat as they generally spread quite a lot, and often to other parts of the body making it very serious.