“On Tuesday the American Cancer Society (ACS) released its annual report on cancer statistics in the U.S., and it offered a rare bit of good news: the proportion of people who were alive at least five years after a cancer diagnosis hit a record high.

The report found that, among all cancer patients diagnosed between 2015 and 2021 in the U.S., the survival rate at the five-year mark relative to those who didn’t have cancer was 70 percent. This is the highest rate ever recorded by ACS. The researchers attributed the gains to better detection and treatment, as well as cutbacks in smoking…

Some of the most fatal cancers saw the greatest improvement in survival. The five-year relative survival rate for myeloma (a type of cancer that affects bone marrow), for instance, nearly doubled between the 1990s and now, jumping from 32 to 62 percent, while liver cancer survival more than tripled from 7 to 22 percent.

In part, that’s because of greater understanding of the cancer genome and the development of targeted therapies against cancer mutations.”

From Scientific American.