Annual Canadian Cancer Society statistics show increase in blood cancer survival rates.
“Across the board there’s good news related to cancer survival,” said Kelly Cull, the society’s regional director for public policy, in an interview Wednesday.
“We’re seeing increases in the number of people who are surviving the most common cancers.”
The overall cancer survival rate has improved since the early 1990s from 55 per cent to 63 per cent. The survival rates are even higher in that time period for blood cancers such as non-Hodgins lymphoma (from 49 per cent to 68 per cent), leukemia (43 per cent to 59 per cent and multiple myeloma (27 per cent to 44 per cent).
But even with those improvements, the report said, an estimated 7,450 people in Canada are expected to die of a blood cancer this year.
“Precision medicine has really been the key to unlocking some of the treatments around blood cancer,” Cull said. “We know that precision medicine is a new and entirely different way of treating cancer that’s based on the unique figures of the individual. It could be their gene but most often it’s (the) particular type of cancer that person has.”
