Women diagnosed with breast cancer have a much less risk of mortality than compared to 20 years ago, a new study from the University of Oxford has found.
The research discovered that, for women with the cancer during the 1990s, the risk of death within five years of diagnosis was 14% on average while for those diagnosed between 2010 and 2015 the average was just 5%.
To carry out their analysis, researchers evaluated data from more than 512,000 women who were diagnosed with early breast cancer between January 1993 and December 2020.
Other findings from the study included that the majority women diagnosed with breast cancer today have less than a 3% risk of dying within the first five years, although for the modern cohort five-year mortality varied significantly between different patient characteristics – i.e. age, tumour size and grade, and whether the cancer was detected during screening.
While other studies have already corroborated this one’s core findings, this particular work from the University of Oxford is the first to ascertain the extent to which mortality risk has decreased as well as whether that applies to all types of patients.
“Our study can also be used to estimate risk for individual women in the clinic,” said the author of the study, Carolyn Taylor, who is a professor of oncology at the University of Oxford.
“It shows that prognosis after a diagnosis of early breast cancer varies widely. Patients and clinicians can use our results to estimate prognosis moving forward.”
Hilary and Mairead, two women whose data were used in the study, reflect on how they helped to shape a research study into breast cancer.
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The work was jointly funded by the University of Oxford, the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and Cancer Research UK.
“In the future further research may be able to reduce the risk of dying from breast cancer even more,” added Prof Taylor.
Image credit: iStock
