Originally published August 15 2005
Study finds smaller breast cancer tumors in women
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A new study has found that the survival rate for breast cancer patients is not due to improved health care, but because the average tumor is smaller.
Much of the improvement in breast cancer survival in recent years is because the average tumour is smaller, not just because treatments are so much better, a huge new study has found.
For women 65 and older with early-stage tumours - the most common scenario - the shift in size accounted for virtually all of the improvement in survival.
"We don't in any way want to diminish the benefits we've seen from advances in treatment because they've been enormous," said lead researcher Elena Elkin.
Mammograms have increased dramatically in recent years and are the chief reason that cancers at present are detected sooner and smaller than they were in years past.
"This really helps to show the importance of screening," said Debbie Saslow, who heads breast cancer research at the American Cancer Society.
For example, the number of local-stage breast cancers that were smaller than 1 centimetre rose from less than 10 per cent from 1975 through 1979 to 25 per cent from 1995 through 1999.
Of regional-stage cancers - those that spread to nearby tissue or lymph nodes but not widely throughout the body - the portion that were smaller than 2 centimetres rose from one-fifth to one-third.
Next, researchers compared five-year survival rates for these time periods, taking into account the shift in tumour size.
For women with local-stage breast cancers, survival rose from nearly 91 per cent to more than 97 per cent, but was only 93 per cent after adjusting for smaller tumours.
Attributing the benefit of smaller tumours to early detection and mammograms "makes a lot of intuitive sense, but that's of course why we do studies as opposed to depend on leaps of logic," he said.
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