“An analysis showcases the past half-century’s biggest cancer success stories — but also highlights the recalcitrant malignancies that continue to vex researchers.

The report, released last month by the American Association for Cancer Research1 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, finds that 71% of people with cancer in the United States will live for at least five years after diagnosis, up from 49% in the late 1970s…

Among the success stories, gains in lung cancer survival rates are particularly striking, says Rebecca Siegel, a cancer epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, Georgia. Lung cancer is one of the world’s biggest causes of death, and on average, only 13% of people diagnosed with the condition between 1975 and 1979 lived for another five years. Between 2016 and 2022, that number reached 29%…

Meanwhile, progress in treating childhood leukaemias is widely considered to be among the greatest achievements in cancer research. For children and adolescents up to 19 years old, the 5-year survival rate for lymphoid leukaemia has risen from 57% to 90%…

Other highlights include liver cancer, for which five-year survival has tripled to 22% since the mid-1990s.”

From Nature.