Long-term patient survival for some of the more frequently occurring cancers.

Conditional five-year relative survival rates were calculated for patients diagnosed during 1950-1959 to examine long-term survival patterns for some of the more frequently occurring cancers. The data on the patients studied were collected as part of the national cancer institute's End Results Program. Breast cancer patients with localized disease were found to have only slightly increasing conditional rates for 20 years subsequent to diagnosis beginning at 85% at diagnosis and exceeding 90% at 20 years subsequent to diagnosis. Conditional five-year rates for patients with distant involvement approached the conditional rates for patients with regional involvement 15 years after diagnosis. Conditional rates by stage for patients with cancer of the cervix or cancer of the corpus increased initially and then became somewhat constant at a level related to stage of disease at diagnosis. For cancer of the colon, the conditional rates for female patients in each stage of disease category approached the same value 7-8 years subsequent to diagnosis. These observations may provide additional insight into the biological behavior of these cancers.