Significant gains seen in 10-year breast cancer survival

Only one in four women diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1940s was alive 10 years later, compared with three of four women diagnosed in recent years, based on the data covering a 60-year period at one institution.

Overall, the 10-year survival rate for all types of breast cancer improved significantly, from 25 percent between 1944 and 1954, to 77 percent between 1995 and 2004. This improvement is linked to earlier disease detection and a multimodal approach to management and treatment of patients with different stages of breast cancer.

The study’s goal was to quantify the steady improvement in breast cancer survival rates over the past 60 years in patients at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The survival rates seen at MD Anderson are generalizable to rates at smaller regional hospitals and community cancer centers, given the rapid adoption of the multimodal treatment, multimodal new therapies.

“If patients are appropriately managed, they have a much better chance of surviving breast cancer today than they would have had 30 or 20 even 10 years ago, because the therapies are constantly evolving and improving,” according to a professor of medicine and breast medical oncology at the center.

Therefore, if the approaches used at MD Anderson are applied in the community, similar outcomes can be achieved.

Reviewed were the center’s detailed database on the breast cancer patients dating back to the 1940s. The database included approximately 57,000 breast cancer patients seen between 1944 and 2004. The review included 12,809 patients who had their diagnoses established and treatment initiated at MD Anderson.

Ten-year survival rates improved significantly from the 1944-1954 period to the 1995-2004 period: For local breast cancer, the rates rose from 55 percent to 86 percent and for regional breast cancer they increased from 16 percent to 76 percent. The survival rate for metastatic disease improved from 3 percent to 22 percent.