Topic summary
Five-year survival rates
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Five-year survival rate.
Applications
Five-year survival rates can be used to compare the effectiveness of treatments. Use of five-year survival statistics is more useful in aggressive diseases that have a shorter life expectancy following diagnosis, such as lung cancer, and less useful in cases with a long life expectancy, such as prostate cancer. Improvements in rates are sometimes attributed to improvements in diagnosis rather than to improvements in prognosis. To compare treatments independently from diagnostics, it may be better to consider survival from reaching a certain stage of the disease or its treatment.