BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! 9: Chances of SURVIVING Breast Cancer Are Better Than Ever!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130327132535.htm

I thought I’d share some GOOD news for once!

“...breast cancer has made tremendous strides as well, with five-year survival rising from 75 percent in 1975 to almost 89 percent in 2012...women with breast cancer account for 22 percent of survivors [of all types of cancer]...”

I’m not sure that there’s much more to say!

While men still don’t TALK about Breast Cancer – and I get almost NO replies to the blog here; and I’ve NEVER had a reply from a male – people are reading my blog in slowly increasing numbers and my hope is that there are a few men who stumble across the blog and get a measure of help or hope. (If any of you EVER wanted to write to me – DO!)

“The report, published in the AACR's journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, shows that as of January 2012, there were approximately 13.7 million cancer survivors in the United States, a number that is expected to rise by 31 percent to 18 million by 2022.”

Just out of curiosity, I found a list of currently identified cancers in the US:

Most Common: bladder, breast, colorectal, endometrial, kidney, leukemia, lung, melanoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, pancreatic, prostate, thyroid. (These made up 1,323,000 people.)

Less Common: adrenocortical, Kaposi sarcoma, anal, appendix, astrocytoma, atypical teratoid/rhaboid, basal cell, bile duct, bone, brain stem, brain, cardio, cervical, craniopharyngeal, esophageal, esthesioneuroblastoma, Ewing’s, eye, gallbladder, gastrointestinal, germ cell (testicular, ovarian, etc), gestational trophoblastic, head and neck, heart, liver, Hodgkin, hypopharyngeal, intraocular, laryngeal, mouth, myeloma, nasopharyngeal, neuroblastoma, oral, papillomatosis, penile, pituitary, plasma cell neoplasm, salivary gland, skin, small intestine, soft tissue sarcoma, throat, urethral, and uterine. Many of these have subdivisions of types, several have pediatric forms that differ from the adult form. (Based on the above figures, these make up 12.4 million cases of cancer and cancer survivors.)

With a US population of 313,914,000 and 13,700,000 million cancer survivors, that means that 1 person out of every 23 have experienced the horror of a cancer diagnosis, some sort of treatment AND HAVE LIVED TO CELEBRATE THEIR SURVIVAL!

Resources: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/alphalist/y
Image: http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/2010/10/05/00/8177892.standalone.prod_affiliate.56.JPG