April 9, 2015 – Survival

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Anchor lead:  There’s good news on the nation’s cancer scorecard, Elizabeth Tracey reports

The majority of people who are diagnosed with cancer will be alive five years later, recent data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, looks at the numbers.

Nelson: The most common cancers in our country are cancers of the prostate, the breast, lung, colon and rectum, and if you look at the five year survival for those, five year survival for prostate cancer is 97%, for breast cancer 88%, for colon and rectum 63%, and for lung cancer in some ways a dismal 18% that’s the place where we need to do better, but overall, for everyone with a diagnosis of cancer, it’s almost 2/3 of them are still alive five years after diagnosis, all this means is that we’re doing better and we still have a ways to go.  :30

Nelson credits screening as helpful in identifying cancers early as one helpful strategy but says choices like diet and smoking cessation are also important.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.