Cancer was once a death sentence. But no more. A new study has found nearly half the people diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. actually die from other causes.
These findings suggest people living with cancer could benefit from more comprehensive, less cancer-focused health care approaches.
The study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Richmond this week, analyzed the health records of 1,807 patients diagnosed with breast, prostate, cervical, lung, colorectal and other cancers.
Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University followed patients for more than 18 years, during which 776 died. But only 51 percent died from cancer; the other 49 percent died from other causes – primarily heart disease.
The longer patients survived after their cancer diagnosis, the more likely they were to die from another disease.
“We realized that the mortality rates for some types of cancer, such as breast cancer, had declined," said lead researcher Dr. Yi Ning. "Cancer survivors live much longer than they did several decades ago. So with this large group of cancer survivors, we need to pay more attention to cancer survivors' overall health."