Most people with early breast cancer can ‘expect to be long-term survivors’

Their findings revealed a substantial decline in the risk of death from breast cancer since the 1990s, which they say should reassure patients and clinicians.

“Our study is good news for the vast majority of women today diagnosed with early breast cancer”

Study authors

They found that the average risk of dying from breast cancer within five years of a diagnosis has fallen from 14% to 5% since the 1990s.

For those diagnosed between 2010 and 2015, more than six in 10 women had a five-year risk of 3% or less, researchers from the British medical journal.

The authors, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, said their findings could be used to reassure most women treated for early breast cancer that they were likely to become long-term survivors. term.

They also pointed out that the results could be used to help identify people for whom the risk of dying from breast cancer remains substantial.

While the risk of dying from breast cancer found in the early stages has declined in recent decades, the magnitude of this decrease was previously unknown, the researchers said.

Further, they noted that it was unclear whether this decrease applied to groups of women with certain characteristics or whether it applied to all groups.

They looked at data from the National Cancer Recording and Analysis Service to study the long-term risks of dying from breast cancer after an early breast cancer diagnosis.

They included the 512,447 women in England with early breast cancer – confined to the breast and possibly the axillary lymph nodes – as their first cancer from January 1993 to December 2015, and who were initially treated with surgery.

Annual breast cancer mortality rates and five-year cumulative risks were estimated, taking into account time since diagnosis, calendar period of diagnosis, and characteristics such as age, whether the cancer was detected by screening, lymph node involvement and tumor size and grade .

The results show that for women diagnosed in each of the calendar periods 1993-99, 2000-04, 2005-09, and 2010-15, the annual breast cancer death rate was highest during of the five years following the diagnosis, then decreased.

The five-year cumulative risk of breast cancer mortality was, on average, 14.4% for women diagnosed between 1993 and 1999, but only 4.9% for women whose diagnosis was made between 2010 and 2015.

Looking at just the 156,338 women diagnosed between 2010 and 2015, the five-year cumulative risk of breast cancer mortality varied significantly among women with different characteristics.

The risk varied by the patient’s age, whether the cancer was detected by screening, whether it had certain receptors, and by the size of the cancer, the grade and the number of lymph nodes involved.

Accordingly, the researchers acknowledged that these observational results could not determine the specific causes of these reductions in mortality.

However, they said the study provided a detailed and accurate picture of breast cancer mortality in a full population of women with early breast cancer for up to 20 years.

Data analysis could “provide patients with early breast cancer, and the clinicians treating them, with estimates of their likely prognosis based on up-to-date data,” they said.

“Our study is good news for the vast majority of women diagnosed with early breast cancer today because their prognosis has improved so much,” the study authors said.

“Most of them can expect to become long-term cancer survivors,” they added.