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Canadians diagnosed with lung cancer and ovarian cancer have among the highest survival rates in the world, a new study reveals.
Overall, cancer patients in this country live longer than their counterparts in Britain, Denmark and Norway, and rival survival patterns in Sweden and Australia, the data show.
"It's a good news story for cancer patients," Dr. Heather Bryant, vice-president for cancer control at the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, said in an interview. "Canada does well when compared to other countries."
The research, published in Wednesday's edition of the medical journal The Lancet, examined survival rates for lung, breast, colorectal and ovarian cancer between 1995 and 2007 in six wealthy countries with universal health-care systems.
The study, the first to systematically compare performance between countries, notes that survival rates have increased for all four cancers in all the countries during the 12-year period, but the disparities suggest that there is a significant number of avoidable deaths.
"Cancer survival is a key measure of the effectiveness of health-care systems," said Sir Mike Richards, national director for cancer at England's department of health and one of the 80 members of the International Benchmarking Partnership.
Dr. Bryant noted that all six countries have implemented national cancer strategies in recent years (including Canada in 2007) and she said the data will help each country refine its goals.
In Canada, the five-year conditional survival rate for lung cancer is 42.1 per cent; by comparison it is a dismal 28.2 per cent in Britain.
For women diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the five-year conditional survival rate is 54.4 per cent in Canada, one of the best in the world.
In Canada, the five-year survival rate for breast cancer is 89.6 per cent, and for colorectal cancer it is 76.4 per cent, but the variations between countries are small. The five-year conditional survival rate includes only patients who have lived more than a year after cancer diagnosis, eliminating the most aggressive cases and those diagnosed in the late stages of disease.
(Prostate cancer, another big cancer killer, was not examined because differences in screening policies make comparisons difficult.)
There were more than 2.4 million cancer patients included in the analysis.
An estimated 173,800 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in 2010, according to the Canadian Cancer Society. At least 76,200 Canadians will die of cancer this year.
That figure includes 20,600 lung cancer deaths, 9,100 colorectal cancer deaths, 5,400 breast cancer deaths and 1,750 ovarian cancer deaths.
Editor's note: The five-year conditional survival rate for ovarian cancer in Canada is 54.4 per cent. Incorrect information appeared in the original newspaper version and an earlier online version of this article. This online version has been corrected.