What are some of the survival statistics for mesothelioma?
Here again are numbers which do not reflect the results of the most current treatments.
According the American Cancer Society, the medical literature shows that the average survival times for people with mesothelioma ranges between 4 and 18 months. The 5 year survival rate is 10% - that means 10% of patients are still alive five years later.
However, better survival rates are being reported during studies of new treatments for mesothelioma. For example, one treatment for peritoneal mesothelioma starts with a debulking surgery to remove all of the visible tumor in the abdomen, followed by bathing the abdominal organs with warm chemotherapy agents. In one study, the 5 year survival rate after this surgery was 63%, meaning that 63% of the patients were still alive 5 years later. In another similar study, the median survival time was 87.2 months. That means half the patients lived another 7 years.
There is also a study showing that patients with Stage 4 mesothelioma lived on average approximately 13 months after treatment with two chemotherapy agents.