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Statistics are averages based on large numbers of patients. They
cannot predict exactly what will happen to you. No patients are exactly
alike and response to treatment also varies from one person to another. You
should feel free to ask your doctor about your prognosis, but not even your
doctor can tell you for sure what will happen. You may hear your doctor
use the term '5 year survival'. This relates to the proportion of people
in research studies who were still alive 5 years after diagnosis. This is
because doctors follow what happens to people for 5 years after treatment in
any research study.
Generally
speaking, with cancer the outcome depends on how advanced your cancer is when
it is diagnosed. Usually with cancer, the statistics are given for each
stage. Stage is just as important for mesothelioma as it is for other
cancers. But finding the statistics is more difficult to do.
This is because
· Mesothelioma is not all that common, (although
incidence is increasing)
·
It is usually diagnosed when it is advanced -
people may not have symptoms early on and so don't go to the doctor
· Statistics by stage aren't readily available
because most people don't have surgery and accurate staging needs an
operation
All the types
of mesothelioma have a poor outlook. By the time someone has symptoms and goes
to their doctor, the disease is very often advanced. Because few people are
diagnosed early, there are no reliable statistics for 5 year survival rates for
the early stages of mesothelioma.
Msotheioma patients are often told that they may have less than a year to live.
But mesothelioma specialists, working in leading cancer centres throughout the
world, often report better statistics than this based on clinical trials that
they are carrying out.
Generally, of all those people diagnosed with mesothelioma only about 1 in 10
(10%) will be alive 3 years later and 1 in 20 (5%) will be alive 5 years
later. For those people who have been diagnosed and treated in the
earlier stages of the disease, there is little information to draw on.
But we have seen reports that quote survival rates of up to 1 in 2 (50%) after
2 years. So the range of survival times is very wide.
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