Survival Rates Cancer Type

When some average mope at a party learns that I blog about brain tumors, I get questions, a lot of particularly morbid questions like:

• “How bad is brain cancer compared to other cancers?”
• “How long does ______(our friend)  have to live?”
• “What’s the worst cancer to have?”

I rarely know how to answer these questions because it’s hard to think of a brain tumor or cancer that isn’t bad and I know almost nothing about the victim's situation.

I just found the Cancer Research UK website, though, which is helpful in providing information on how to compare the different cancers.  The average survival rates give everybody – victims, caregivers, friends & family – have some vague idea of what to expect (although, as with most everything in life, your survival rate may differ).

If you go to this website, poke around a bit, there’s a lot of good information.

Here’s a link: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/survival/common-cancers-compared#heading-Zero

John

PS - I find this whole business of comparing cancers and deciding whose friend/relative/significant other has the worse cancer to be particularly idiotic.  Here’s my excerpt from my book, “Chief Complaint, Brain Tumor” - http://www.chief-complaint.com/ - about such inane conversations:

“The phrase “brain tumor” is scary and difficult to slide into any casual,

over-the-fence-with-the-neighbor conversation. I imagined the following

conversation when running into a friend at Starbuck’s:

“Hey Fred, how’s it going?”

“Great! Our daughter Mary just made the high school jazz band as the

bass player, the only student to ever be picked as a sophomore.”

“Congratulations!”

“And you, how’s it going?”

“Well, I’ve just been diagnosed with a brain tumor—the tumor’s as big

as your wife’s fist.”

“No shit. Well…how about them Bears?”

And with your more competitive acquaintances, I could imagine the

following conversation with Ashton:

“John, how are you? It’s good to see you.”

“I’ve just been diagnosed as having a brain tumor.”

“Really, what kind?”

“It’s a Grade I meningioma. It’s about as big as your fist.”

“Well, my brother Dave has a Grade III metastatic brain tumor. It’s a

Gliomas type of brain tumor. We’re very worried about it infiltrating adjacent

brain tissue. You should be grateful that you only have a Grade I meningioma!”

Researchers uncover 'fingerprint' of breast cancers that spread to the brain

That's the headline of an article posted on the Cancer Research UK website. It’s the kind of a headline that made me think of so many questions that I had to read the article.

The article itself reports that “Breast cancer cells that break off from tumours have a biological 'fingerprint' that could allow doctors to spot women whose disease is likely to spread to the brain, according to US research.”

I had to reread this first sentence of the article several times, because it seemed so punitive: “Breast cancer cells that break off from tumours have a biological 'fingerprint' that could allow doctors to spot women whose disease is likely to spread to the brain, according to US research.”

I never knew that breast cancer cells can migrate and start causing brain cancer.  So some poor woman first gets the news that, “Sorry, you have breast cancer.” And then, she gets the double whammy of “and, by the way, you breast cancer has morphed into brain cancer.”

Of course, the problems don’t stop there. According the abstract of the original research, from Sciencemag.com, “Brain metastatic breast cancer (BMBC) is uniformly fatal and increasing in frequency. Despite its devastating outcome, mechanisms causing BMBC remain largely unknown.”

The words “uniformly fatal” and “increasing in frequency” sound pretty scary to me alone, let alone used together in the same sentence.

Nonetheless, these plucky researchers see this as good news announcing that “This could lead to better ways of treating women with the disease, and even to new drugs to stop it spreading.”

Here’s a link the Cancer Research UK website article: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/news/archive/cancernews/2013-04-10-Researchers-uncover-fingerprint-of-breast-cancers-that-spread-to-the-brain

And here’s the link to the original research abstract entitled The Identification and Characterization of Breast Cancer CTCs Competent for Brain Metastasis: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/180/180ra48