Cancer Survival Depends on Where You Live

U.S. does better than Europe, although American whites do better than blacks, study finds

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

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WEDNESDAY, July 16 (HealthDay News) -- Your odds of surviving cancer depend on which country you live in. And, in the United States, it also depends on whether you're black or white, a new study finds.

Economic differences among countries, access to health care, and the availability of cancer treatments feed the disparities in survival, the report said.

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"There is a very wide global range in the odds of survival after a cancer diagnosis," said lead researcher Michel Coleman, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Great Britain. "Some of the range is understandable on the basis of the relative wealth of these countries," he added.

The study also confirms the disparity in cancer survival among blacks and whites in the United States, Coleman said. "The differences are large across the U.S.A., and even in different metropolitan areas," he said.

Coleman believes the differences among countries -- and within regions of countries -- is directly related to access to health care. "This is not a question of the competence of doctors in any particular country," he said. "This is an issue of the overall effectiveness of health services."

The report was published in the July 17 online edition of The Lancet Oncology.

For the study, called the CONCORD study, Coleman's team collected data on 1.9 million cancer patients in 31 countries. Using cancer registries from each country, the researchers compared the five-year survival rates for breast, colon, rectal and prostate cancer.

The United States has the highest rates of survival for breast and prostate cancers, while Japan has the highest survival rates for colon and rectal cancers among men. France has the highest survival rates for colon and rectal cancer among women, the report found.

In addition, Canada and Australia also have very high survival rates for most cancers. The lowest rate of survival among both men and women was seen in Algeria.

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