Conditional Survival Among Cancer Patients in the United States

Abstract

Purpose. To report 5-year relative cancer survival probabilities conditional on having already survived >1 years after the initial diagnosis for 11 cancer sites, diagnosed during 1990 -2001 and followed through 2006.Methods. Analyses are based on 1,151,496 cancer cases in population-based cancer registries in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program of the National Cancer Institute.Results. The 5-year relative conditional survival probability tended to improve with each year already survived. Improvement was greatest for more lethal cancers (e.g., lung or pancreas) and for cases with a more advanced stage at diagnosis. The 5-year relative survival probability conditional on already having survived 5 years exceeded 90% for locally staged prostate cancer, melanoma (whites only), breast cancer (females only), corpus uteri cancer, urinary bladder cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, rectal cancer, colon cancer, ovary cancer, and pancreatic cancer. Only lung cancer did not reach 90%. For these cancer sites combined, 5-year relative survival probability conditional on already having survived 5 years averaged about 85% for regionally staged disease, 68% for distant staged disease, and 87% for unknown staged disease. The 5-year relative conditional survival probability tended to be significantly lower among patients diagnosed at older ages, among males, among nonwhites, and among those diagnosed during 1990 -1995 compared with later years.Conclusion. Conditional survival probability estimation provides further useful prognostic information to cancer patients, tailored to the time already survived since diagnosis. The Oncologist 2010;15:873-882

Conditional net survival: Relevant prognostic information for colorectal cancer survivors. A French population-based study

“…Interestingly, the prognostic influence of age on conditional survival disappeared after patients had survived one year. This finding is in line with previously reported studies, but was not commented [5,[9][10][11]14]. It suggests that longterm differences in survival according to age are related only to survival disparities during the year following diagnosis.…”

“…Several studies have previously published results on conditional survival from colorectal cancer [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Few of them include detailed data of patients and his tumour (stage at diagnosis, location) and none have a 33-year period study.…”

Conditional Survival Is Greater Than Overall Survival at Diagnosis in Patients With Osteosarcoma and Ewing’s Sarcoma

“…The implication of this finding is that patients with advanced disease, while having an overall poorer prognosis than local/regional disease, experience a greater positive shift in their risk profile with each passing year. A similar trend in the improvement of 5-year survival rates with each additional year of survival has been noted for breast, colon, ovarian, uterine, melanoma, rectal, bladder, lung, and pancreatic cancer [21].…”

“…These estimates are clinically helpful and have not been reported previously for osteosarcoma or Ewing's sarcoma, although they have for some other common malignancies, including ovarian, brain, squamous cell, breast, pancreatic, lung, melanoma, bladder, gastric, and rectal cancers [5,6,11,15,17,20,21,27,[29][30][31]. In an analysis of high-grade osteosarcoma and Ewing's sarcoma in patients younger than 40 years at the time of diagnosis in the SEER database from 1973 to 2009, we found continual improvement in 5-year conditional survival rates with each successive year of survival after diagnosis.…”

Controversies Concerning the Use of Neoadjuvant Systemic Therapy for Primary Breast Cancer

“…Even though the incidence of malignant breast tumors has increased, improvement in treatment has led to a decrease of mortality over the last two decades [1]. Nevertheless, mortality rates increase with inclining stage of disease [2]. Especially for locally advanced breast cancer, efforts have been made to downstage disease to improve the prognosis using neoadjuvant systemic treatment (NAST).…”