Fewer Deaths, More Survivors of Breast Cancer

A recent study that spans a decade reveals that women facing breast cancer in England, United Kingdom, have much better chances of survival since a decade ago than in the 1990s.

“We knew that mortality had reduced during the past 20 years, but we didn’t know by how much,” explains Carolyn Taylor, lead author of the study and an oncologist at the University of Oxford. “That’s a two-thirds reduction.”

The study took 10 years to be completed and involved 512 447 women diagnosed with early invasive breast cancer between January 1993 and December 2015. Women diagnosed between 1993 and 1999 had a 14.4% risk of dying within 5 years, and that ratio dropped to 4.9% for women diagnosed between 2010 and 2015. It is suspected that this is due to increased awareness of breast cancer and routine screening offered to women.