The USA Hit A Cancer Survival Milestone Nobody Has Ever Seen Before

For the first time in recorded history, seven in ten Americans diagnosed with cancer are now alive five years after their diagnosis, according to the American Cancer Society's Cancer Statistics 2026 report, marking a milestone that would have seemed almost unimaginable when the organization began tracking these numbers 75 years ago. In the mid-1970s, the five-year survival rate for all cancers combined stood at just 49 percent, meaning a cancer diagnosis was essentially a coin toss. Today that number has reached 70 percent, a transformation driven by earlier detection, the dramatic expansion of cancer screening, decades of federally funded research into targeted therapies and immunotherapies, and a sustained decline in smoking rates. The report, published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, found that 4.8 million cancer deaths have been averted in the United States since 1991, representing 3.25 million men and 1.55 million women who are alive because of the cumulative progress made over those decades.

The gains are most striking in the cancers that once carried the bleakest prognoses. The five-year survival rate for myeloma has nearly doubled, rising from 32 to 62 percent since the mid-1990s. Liver cancer survival has tripled, from 7 to 22 percent. Lung cancer, still the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, has seen its five-year survival rate rise from 15 to 28 percent overall, with even more dramatic gains for people diagnosed at advanced stages: distant-stage lung cancer survival improved from 2 to 10 percent, and five-year survival for all distant-stage cancers combined has doubled from 17 to 35 percent. Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of surveillance research at the ACS and lead author of the report, described the number plainly: seven in ten people now survive their cancer five years or more, up from only half in the mid-1970s. The ACS simultaneously warned that federal funding threats to cancer research and health insurance access could reverse the progress that generations of researchers, patients, and public health advocates have spent decades building.

Source:https://techfixated.com/the-us-reached-a-cancer-survival-milestone/