by Lauren Daniels

Created on: October 21, 2008

So what do you think when someone tells you they have cancer?

Of course, your immediate thought is 'Oh God. They're going to die.' Not necessarily.

Although the elusive cure for cancer is still out of reach, many cancers are in fact treatable, and in some cases curable. There are 26 types of cancer; bladder, bone, bowel, brain, breast, cervical, Hodgkin's, kidney, laryngeal, leukaemia, liver, lung, multiple myeloma (blood cells), non-Hodgkin's, oesophageal, oral, ovarian, pancreatic, prostate, skin, stomach, testicular, thyroid, uterine, vaginal and vulva.

Of these, testicular cancer, Hodgkin's and many cases of leukaemia are cured with chemotherapy. Most skin cancers are completely cured with surgery - this is 90% of people with basal cell cancer and 70-90% of people with squamous cell cancer. 75% of breast cancer is cured if caught at stage one.

So, five out of twenty-six cancers have a definitive cure. Good news for the people with testicular cancer, Hodgkin's disease, leukaemia, skin or breast cancer. What about the other twenty-one? Well, 4 of them make up over half of all new diagnoses (in order of most common): breast, lung, bowel and prostate. Only one can be definitively cured. So, this must mean that around half of all cancer cases die, right?

Well, let's look at the second most common cancer. We all know the most common cause; smoking. It is the most common cause of death from cancer in the UK and only 7% of lung cancer sufferers survive longer than 5 years after diagnosis. The quicker lung cancer is diagnosed, the higher the survival rate, but more than two-thirds of lung cancers are diagnosed at a late stage and therefore survival rates are lower. Well, I could suggest the cure is obvious here. So we may leave this one, as of course, people must decide for themselves whether their life is worth quitting smoking.

Onto the third most common cancer: bowel. Over 80% of bowel cancer patients will survive for more than five years if diagnosed at the earliest stage. Good news? Yes. Five year survival rates have doubled in the past 30 years and 90% of bowel cancers are cured if caught early. So that's another group that can breathe a sigh of relief.

And our fourth most common cancer, prostate. A tricky subject for most men to talk about. How many guys do you know that would sit there and admit something is not quite right down there? Maybe they feel emasculated? Surely the worry of ill health or even dying might prod them into coming forward? Well, if the constant worry doesn't help them into getting help, then these statistics might. Approximately 90% of prostate cancers are caught in the early stages, so the survival rate is nearly 100%. Which is fantastic news.

So now we know 8 out of 26 cancers can be cured (or prevented, in the case of lung cancer). So what about the other 18? Is getting any one of those 18 left an automatic death sentence? Well, as a general consensus, if the cancer is in 'early' or 'non-invasive' stages, there's a higher chance you will survive. If the cancer is 'invasive' or even 'advanced' and has spread to another organ, such as liver, lungs or bones, then unfortunately it can be a death sentence.

But to keep optimistic, there are trials being done all the time looking for ways to treat this absolute horror of a disease, and new medicines and vaccines are being invented constantly; such as the new cervical cancer vaccines, which will save countless lives and keep countless loved ones on this Earth, where they should be.

(information on the 26 cancers and statistics sourced from Cancer Research UK

(information on prostate cancer sourced from Prostate Cancer Foundation

(information on survival rate sourced from CancerHelp UK

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