Survival rates question

I understood it was from point of diagnosis when your tumour histology comes back in full.

Here you can see what the NHS uses for prediction. You can view both before and after different types of treatments.

One thing to keep in mind is that these statistics are based on treatments that were given in the past. We, who are being treated now, sometimes with new drugs and new protocols, are going to be part of tomorrow's statistic, which I expect will be even better than today's.

Also, this is an overall statistic that may include people who are older than you are and who have background medical issues which you might not have. This again could mean that your own probabilities may well be better than the average.

Thank you so much for your speedy reply. Much appreciated . 
Jennifer

Thank you for your quick reply. 
I tried filling out the form but unfortunately I don’t know all the details to get a proper reading but yes, I guess these are for previous patients of different ages etc. 

I was just trying to get some reassurance that almost 2 years on , I’m free of it. 

Thanks again 

Jennifer 

I too didn't have all the details at first, so I played with it to see worst and best scenarios, then got the details I needed so I could see the prediction that would best match my circumstances. 

But yeah, I get what you are saying. I wish they had the option to ask for 1,2,3,4 and 5 years predictions not of survival, but of recurrence. There may be research papers about that. If you feel comfortable diving into medical literature they may give you some pointers, just make sure they are as recent as you can get.

Hi Grey Cats, I tried diving in to the literature to do just this, but really it is very hard to find reliable recurrence risks rather than overall survival, which includes both people without disease and people with metastases. It is also important to differentiate between local recurrence risk which is still curable, rather than distant recurrence which is treatable. There are lots of studies where you can look at the outcomes but for a smaller number of women each time and it tends to be only by stage, not the specifics of your tumour type, number of lymph nodes and so on. I asked my oncologist but they also struggled to come up with disease free survival stats for me too.

Yeah. I have spent some hours going down rabit holes at times. A fun place to lose yourself is the this American governemment website, and there are some others, as well as websites belonging to certain universities. It can be very frustrating. I was trying to find information pertaining to something very specific, only to be later told by an oncology pharmacist that the drug I was interested in was so new they haven't yet had time to publish the literature. If only I'd known before I went hunting!  The searches have, no occasion, accidentally yielded data that I found useful but would not have been aware of otherwise, so I guess it's worth it even if I don't get what I went in for. Another aspect of all of this is that unless their sample group is large enough, their statistics sometimes may not be as accurate as they might have been had they included 10X or 100X patients in their study. I do wish there were definite answers, but it's all about approximations and descriptions of how it had been; unfortunately there is no way at this time to get a really accurate view of how it now is.