What does a cancer diagnosis mean?
A diagnosis of cancer does not automatically mean that a person will die of their disease or ultimately be disabled because of it. They may not even need any treatment. Cancers like prostate cancer are frequently diagnosed by chance and often will not cause problems for the man with prostate cancer. This is because prostate cancer is usually slow growing. Elderly men with prostate cancer usually do not die of their cancer but of things like heart disease that is common in men without prostate cancer.
Sometimes prostate cancer can be aggressive and will require major surgery or radical radiotherapy to prevent growth and spread. A combination of information about the disease and treatment planned should give some indication of how disabling a prostate cancer a person has.
Most cancers do need treatment and sometimes this can be physically arduous as well as stressful. Some of these treatments can lead to significant physical and psychological problems some years later. These effects may be in addition to the effects of common chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. Over all level of disability is likely to be greater when multiple problems are present. Common cancers like breast cancer, prostate cancer and uterine cancer have very good survival rates. Recurrent disease may occur years after successful treatment.
Lung cancer is an example of a cancer that causes death in almost everyone who gets it. Most cancers lie between these two extremes. The table below shows the ‘five year survival’ rates for some common cancers in the UK.
Five year survival rates for some common cancers
| Type of cancer | Percent of people with type of cancer surviving for at least five years after diagnosis |
|---|---|
| Lung cancer | 5.8% |
| Breast cancer | 77.5% |
| Colon cancer | 46.9% |
| Prostate cancer | 64.8% |
The survival rates are very variable - prostate cancer is slow growing and even when it has spread (metastasised) outside the prostate gland it can be controlled for a time by hormone therapy. Survival rate is high at 64.8%. Lung cancer on the other hand often presents late because it does not cause symptoms in the early stages and by the time the diagnosis is made the cancer is too large to be removed safely or has already spread outside of the lung (it is at a ‘late’ or ‘advanced’ stage) in which case removing the primary tumour to prevent this spread would be pointless. Survival rate is low at 5.8% at five years.
Some cancers are curable even though they have spread to other parts of the body for example teratoma of the testicle. Other cancers may require extensive treatment for secondary spread over a period of years and cannot be ‘cured’ but life and quality of life can be prolonged for some years despite this for example breast cancer.
