Jump to full article: Reuters, 2002-06-03
Author: Patricia Reaney
Intro: It's still not great but the outlook for patients with lung cancer is improving, thanks to better treatments and early detection of the first signs of the disease, Finnish scientists said on Monday.
Lung cancer is the biggest cancer killer, claiming as many as 300, 000 lives worldwide each year, but more patients are living longer than they would have 20 years ago.
"Survival of lung cancer patients has increased threefold, " Dr. Ritta Makitaro, of Oulu University in Finland, told Reuters.
Only four percent of people diagnosed with the cancer in Oulu in the 1970s were alive five years afterwards. By the 1990s the number had risen to 12 percent.
Makitaro, whose research was reported in the European Respiratory Journal, believes the figures may be even higher because more effective chemotherapy drugs are now on the market.
"It should be even better now since we collected our material in the 1990s, " she added. . .
Patients with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer in women and in people who have never smoked had a 19 percent five-year survival rate. Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer.
But for sufferers with small cell lung cancer, which accounts for about a fifth of cases, survival rates have barely improved during the two decades.
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