Number of patients surviving cancer increasing by almost 1% per year

The number of cancer diagnoses in the Netherlands is increasing, but so is the percentage of patients who are still alive four years after diagnosis. The number of cancer survivors increases by an average of almost 1 percent per year, the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Center (IKNL) reported based on figures from the Netherlands Cancer Registry (NKR). That is about a thousand additional survivors each year.

Thirty years ago, 51 percent of cancer patients survived the first four years after diagnosis, the 4-year survival rate. That number has now risen to 72 percent. Otto Visser, head of the NKR and IKNL, attributes the increase to new research. “Every year, we see that the number of cancer diagnoses is increasing. Fortunately, survival is also increasing. We see that all the research into new treatment methods and new medicines really has an effect,” he said.

There has been a stronger increase in the number of older patients surviving the disease in the past 15 years, but the survival of older patients is still considerably lower than that of younger patients. Patients under the age of 65 have a 10 percent higher chance of survival than patients aged 65 and older.

“Many improvements in treatments, such as better surgeries or more extensive use of chemotherapy or stem cell transplantation, were initially aimed at younger patients, who can often tolerate these types of heavy treatments better than older patients,” Visser said.

The figures also show that some forms of cancer are still much more treatable than others. Patients with skin cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and testicular cancer have the highest survival rate, at 90 percent. Patients with the lowest chance of survival are those with pancreatic cancer and metastatic cancer, where the doctors don’t know where the cancer started. Less than 10 percent of these patients survive the disease.