More People Living Longer After Cancer ...( Advances in ...),Health

Advances in prevention, detection and treatment offer encouragement for people with cancer; Allsup honors cancer survivors by celebrating Cancer Awareness Month in November

Belleville, Ill. (PRWEB) November 7, 2008 -- Advances in treatment and prevention of cancer offer significant encouragement for people with cancer and their families, according to Allsup, a national Social Security Disability Insurance representation company, that is helping raise awareness by observing Cancer Awareness Month in November.

Cancer affects a wide range of the human body's systems and structures, and the treatment costs continue to rise, according to the National Cancer Institute, which issues a Cancer Trends Progress Report every two years. Cancer treatment costs reached $72 billion in 2004, making up about 4.7 percent of total personal healthcare costs in the United States.

But the rate of cancer incidence has declined since the early 1990s, the NCI said. Though the incidence rates of specific types of cancer--liver, pancreas, kidney, esophagus and thyroid--are rising, according to the most recent report published last December.

In addition, cancer survival rates are improving. More people are living five years or longer after diagnosis. In 2004, nearly 10.8 million Americans were alive who had been diagnosed with cancer, the NCI reported. Of those, about 6 percent were longer-term survivors who had been diagnosed at least 29 years earlier. The Healthy People 2010 project, a national consorti
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