When I was first diagnosed, I couldn’t help looking at the Outlook by Stage stats on the Cancer Research website which I found rather worrying.
It was only much later that I found some predictive (forward looking) risk calculators and these gave me much better survival prospects, despite my being at the upper end of Stage 2.
I’ve been wondering why the Cancer Research stats are so different from the risk calculator results. I’ve had another look at the Cancer Research website and spotted something I missed the first time round
“Survival statistics are available for each stage of breast cancer in one area of England. These figures are for women diagnosed in the early 1990’s and the outlook is better for women diagnosed now due to improvements in screening and treatment.” (My bolding).
In order words, their breast cancer stats are based on the treatments of 20 years ago! In those days (I think) many patients didn’t get adjuvant chemo and if they did it would have been 1st generation, whereas we are on 3rd generation chemo these days. No Herceptin then and even the hormonal treatment would have been more basic.
Phew!
I’m not sure why they don’t have more up to date stats. Obviously stats must be a little out of date by the time they are published as by definition they relate to past patients, but data based on the treatments of 20 years ago…