Cancer-survival Gap Narrows In Europe; More Patients Are Cured
Countries where survival rates had been found to be lower in 1995, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia, had larger increases in survival for all cancers combined than did other nations, according to the report.
“Survival has been going up in most countries across Europe and for most cancers, slowly but steadily,” said Michel Coleman, professor of epidemiology and vital statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in a telephone interview yesterday. “Now we must examine which countries appear to do better than others and what is it they do better.”
The rising number of patients cured of lung, stomach and colorectal cancer were particularly significant, showing they are living longer without the worst damage from side effects of cancer care, Coleman said. In contrast, doctors have made little headway against the toughest tumors, including cancers of the pancreas, esophagus and liver, he said.
“There has been a welcome narrowing of the gap between survival in eastern Europe, which has been low for the past 15 years, and northern Europe,” Coleman said.
Men in Iceland in 2003 fared best after a cancer diagnosis, with 47 percent deemed cured in a study compared with 21 percent in Poland, scientists said in the Eurocare-4 study. For women, 59 percent of those in France and Finland on average were cured compared with just 38 percent of those in Poland, the researchers said.
A special issue of the publication outlined progress seen from 1978 through 2003, as medical advances yield longer lives for the more than 3 million Europeans diagnosed with cancer each year.
Ten reports in the journal paint a detailed picture of cancer across the continent, taking data from registries in 23 countries covering more than 150 million people. Researchers said they will next determine whether improvements in access to care or advanced therapies can yield greater benefits.
To examine cancer cures, researchers used a mathematical model to estimate when patients were just as likely to survive as their cancer-free peers. The most progress was seen in patients with lung, stomach and colorectal cancers, said Riccardo Capocaccia, from the National Centre for Epidemiology, Surveillance and Health Promotion, in Rome.