• Question: which cancers are reliably curable

    Asked by anon-328813 on 9 Jun 2022.
    • Photo: Karin Purshouse

      Karin Purshouse answered on 9 Jun 2022: last edited 9 Jun 2022 5:06 pm

      So the curability of most cancers is related to how early you diagnose it – most cancers are curable if diagnosed early. For example, breast cancer, if diagnosed early, can often be cured with surgery and other follow up treatments. Melanoma might be noticed earlier, and so it can be removed before it has a chance to spread. The difficulty comes with cancers where symptoms that might prompt diagnosis happen later, which can more often be the case for example in pancreatic cancer.

    • Photo: Maria Peiris Pages

      Maria Peiris Pages answered on 13 Jun 2022: last edited 13 Jun 2022 11:40 am

      Doctors have greater success finding and treating some types of cancer than others although that is no guarantee of cure when we are talking about cancer. In general, a person who stays cancer-free for 5 years after a diagnosis has a better chance of recovery. Having said so that doesn’t mean you won’t die from cancer or even that you don’t still have it in your body, but it is a good sign. Most of the times it depends on how early a cancer is detected. The earlier, the better. Some cancers with a better 5-year survival rate are prostate cancer, thyroid cancer, melanoma or breast cancer when you find out about it at an early stage.

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