breast cancer pictures

A friend of mine (a young friend - she’s in her early 20s) was diagnosed a couple of months ago with a form of sarcoma. When she was diagnosed, the cancer had already reached stage 4; her survival chances are low, and she’s already gone through several dangerous complications which, even if she survives them, will leave her permanently crippled.

Incidentally, she recognized the symptoms of this cancer nearly a year before she was diagnosed (she didn’t recognize it as cancer, but had been in and out of doctor’s offices for a year before one finally recognized it as sarcoma - and she’s not the type to complain idly) - most of her previous doctors assumed it was some kind of back problem, and she had been sent to chiropractors a couple of times. It was finally recognized as cancer when it started to migrate near her breasts, where abnormal tissues started to serve as warning flags for doctors.

Another family friend died a few years ago of lung cancer; it was also stage 4 when diagnosed. Incidentally, she was given extremely high survival rates when it was first diagnosed as breast cancer; these rates plummeted when her doctors realized that the mass was sitting a little further back than they first found.

It seems that the medical community files cancer into about four categories: breast cancer, prostate cancer, “the patient’s own fault” cancers (e.g. lung cancer and liver cancer, which are assumed to be caused by smoking or drinking, even if they aren’t), and “other” cancers (which, not being as politically popular as breast cancer or prostate cancer, draw very little funding and attention from medical specialists). If you’re unfortunate enough to have a type that’s not breast or prostate cancer, your doctors either actively think you deserve to die, or they’re just completely in the dark about diagnosing and treating your cancer.

Has anyone else suffered losses from the politicization of cancer? Does it p*ss anyone else off that people with the wrong kind of cancer tend to have dismal chances of being diagnosed or treated properly, because cancer has become politicized so all the resources go to the types that can be used to help our little “boys vs. girls” fights?

Cancer Survival Rates Improving Across Europe, But Still Lagging Behind United States

Zosia Chustecka
Information from Industry

October 15, 2008 — New reports from EUROCARE suggest that cancer care in Europe is improving and that the gaps between countries are narrowing. However, comparisons with US statistics suggest that cancer survival in Europe is still lagging behind the United States.

One of the main messages from both reports is that in Europe, “for most cancers, survival has increased and between-country survival differences have decreased over time,” notes an accompanying commentary by Mike Richards, CBE, from the United Kingdom’s Department of Health. However, the differences between countries are not trivial, and “many more lives could be saved if the outcomes of all countries were brought up to the standards of the best” (ie, Norway, Sweden, and Finland), he comments. The United Kingdom in particular comes out badly in the tables, showing cancer survival rates that are among the worst in Europe. The findings suggest that the national cancer plan for England, which began in 2000, is not working, a second editorial comments.

Survival Rates Significantly Higher in United States Than in Europe

One of the reports compares the statistics from Europe with those from the United States and shows that for most solid tumors, survival rates were significantly higher in US patients than in European patients. This analysis, headed by Arduino Verdecchia, PhD, from the National Center for Epidemiology, Health Surveillance, and Promotion, in Rome, Italy, was based on the most recent data available. It involved about 6.7 million patients from 21 countries, who were diagnosed with cancer between 2004 and 2006.

Survival was significantly higher in the United States for all solid tumors. The greatest differences were seen in the major cancer sites: colon and rectum (56.2% in Europe vs 65.5% in the United States), breast (79.0% vs 90.1%), and prostate cancer (77.5% vs 99.3%), and this “probably represents differences in the timeliness of diagnosis,” they comment.

Further analysis of these figures shows that, in the case of men, more than half of the difference in survival between Europe and United States can be attributed to prostate cancer. When prostate cancer is excluded, the survival rates decreased to 38.1% in Europe and 46.9% in the United States. For women, the survival rate of 62.9% for all cancers in the United States is comparable to that seen in the wealthiest European countries (eg, 61.7% in Sweden, 59.7% in Europe), and the slightly higher survival in the United States was largely due to better survival for colorectal and breast cancer, the authors comment.

Lancet Oncol. Published online December 21, 2008.

my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. I searched thee net for the survival stuff and it says something about a 5-year or 10-year survival rate. does this mean my mom is going to live for 5 or 10 years only? or does this apply for untreated cancer? will my mother live longer if she undergoes proper treatment? please help me i’m very confused and worried…btw, she’s 51 years old