Posts Tagged ‘Mortality Rate’

What is the survival rate for people afflicted with Pancreatic Cancer?

Pancreatic Cancer is medically known as Pancreatic Carcinoma. It is the form of cancer that afflicts the pancreas. When we talk about the survival rate of pancreatic cancer patients, we mean the number of people who are still alive after the diagnosis of such a painful cancer type. Generally while enumerating the facts and data about the survival rates of patients, it is calculated on the basis of data about the last five years among the general population. But the matter of fact is that no patients are going to have same condition, so it is difficult to predict the survival rate of a particular pancreatic cancer patient as this varies from patient to patient.

The Pancreas is a large organ that is placed behind the stomach in our human body. It creates an enzyme that helps the body to absorb food; it especially releases a certain kind of enzyme to suck up fats, and hormones like glucose and insulin are produced here. So if the person is suffering from pancreatic cancer, the survival rate is low; as the body keeps on losing its power to soak up all the fats inside the body and it gets worse when body starts trailing its sugar down.

Generally, the survival rate of the pancreatic Cancer depends upon following factors:

• Whether surgery was successful in removing the tumour?
• What is the stage of the cancer?
• What is the size of the tumour?
• Whether the cancer has broadened outside the pancreas such as tissues around the pancreas or lymph nodes?
• Is there any other part of the body which is also affected by the pancreatic cancer?
• What is the general health of the patient?
• Whether the cancer has occurred first time or it is being recurred?

It can be controlled only if it has been diagnosed before it starts getting wider around the tissues. Not only this, but the surgery has to be done as soon as possible in such cases to get the tumour out.

Survival Rates of the pancreatic cancer can be computed using various different techniques for different functions. The Pancreatic Survival rates mentioned in this article is based on relative data and facts. The relative survival rate estimates the survival of the cancer patients in comparison to general inhabitants to compute the after effects of Cancer. Taken as a whole, five year relative survival rate of pancreatic cancer between 1995 and 2001 was 4.6 percent.

The five year relative survival rates on the basis of sex and race were:

Survival Rate on the basis of Stages:

Related five-year relative survival rate on the basis of Stages:

According to American Cancer Society, for all the stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one year relative survival rate is 20% whereas the five year relative survival rate is 4%. The Reason behind low survival rate is that in these cases, diagnosis is done in the stage where surgery is difficult as well as risky to perform in order to save patient’s life or we can say surgery becomes near to impossible.

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Depression very deadly, equivalent to smoking

A bit odd to compare smoking and depression, but the intent of the article was to claim that depression should not be unstated and should be brought out into the open as a dangerous affliction. Smoking is seen as something dangerous that substantially increases the chances of getting into more dangerous complications such as cancer, lung problems; and eventually increases the chance of mortality happening earlier. However, a recent study claims that those people suffering from depression had the same mortality risk as those who smoked.
This was a surprise, since depression is not evaluated in terms of its impact on the mortality chances of an individual, although it has an impact on a higher level of suicide rates, and decreased satisfaction level with life. This means that there should be a greater focus on those people who suffer from depression on an ongoing basis (link to article):

“Unlike smoking, we don’t know how causal the association with depression is but it does suggest that more attention should be paid to this link because the association persisted after adjusting for many other factors,” he said. The study also showed that patients with depression face an overall increased risk of mortality, while a combination of depression and anxiety in patients lowers mortality compared with depression alone.
“One of the main messages from this research is that ‘a little anxiety may be good for you,” Stewart said. “It appears that we’re talking about two risk groups here. People with very high levels of anxiety symptoms may be naturally more vulnerable due to stress, for example through the effects stress has on cardiovascular outcomes.