Chemotherapy Success Rate
Typically people receive chemotherapy alongside other cancer treatments so it makes it harder to determine the survival rate and success of chemotherapy in a patient. A lot of other factors affect the success of chemotherapy including the cancer stage, type of cancer, age, and overall of the patient. Success rates provide an estimate on the basis of outcomes of people with somewhat similar diagnoses. There are numerous factors that might affect how successful chemotherapy will be and the survival rate of a patient. These factors are:
- Cancer survival rates
Cancer survival rates are one of the indicative factors to gauge the effectiveness of chemotherapy against cancer. Survival rate refers to the people who can live for a specific amount of time after getting a diagnosis of cancer. Survival rate also help in gaining an understanding about the possible outcomes of people with same cancer types.
- Cancer stage
Cancer stage depicts how far a tumor is spreading and how large it is. A doctor might use various systems to find out the stage of a cancer in a certain patient. Following is cancer staging system that doctors commonly use:
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- Stage 0: Abnormal cells appear but are not spreading to nearby cells.
- Stage 1, 2, and 3: Cancer is growing. Higher stages depict larger tumors and a more widespread into surrounding tissues.
- Stage 4: The cancer cells start spreading to other parts of the body.
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- Cancer grade
Cancer grade measures how abnormal the cancer cells look under a microscope. Excessive abnormal cells tend to spread and grow at as faster rate.
Success rate of chemotherapy in different cancer types
It is impossible to as such calculate success rates for chemotherapy alone as people are getting other therapies too to treat cancer. Following is the description of overall success rate of different types of cancer with the percentage of people who are receiving chemotherapy as a part of their cancer treatment.