Prostate cancer survival rates: What they mean

No one wants to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. But as cancer diagnoses go, prostate cancer is often a less serious one. Prostate cancer is frequently slow-growing and slow to spread. For many men, prostate cancer is less serious than their other medical conditions.

For these reasons, and possibly because of earlier detection of low-grade prostate cancers, prostate cancer has one of the highest survival rates of any type of cancer. Here's a look at prostate cancer survival rates and what they mean to you.

Prostate cancer is common with ageing

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in Britain, accounting for a quarter of all cancers diagnosed in men. Almost 60% diagnosed are in men over 70.

Prostate cancer accounts for around 13% of male deaths from cancer in the UK and is the second most common cause of cancer death in men, after lung cancer.

But most prostate cancers are slow-growing and non-aggressive. Also, most men are older when they're diagnosed with prostate cancer. The majority of these men eventually pass away from heart disease, stroke, or other causes - not their prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer survival rates are favourable overall

Thinking about survival rates for prostate cancer takes a little mental stretching. Keep in mind that most men are around 70 when diagnosed with prostate cancer. Over approximately five years, many of these men will die from other medical problems unrelated to prostate cancer.

To determine the prostate cancer survival rate, these men are subtracted from the calculations. Counting only the men who are left provides what's called the relative survival rate for prostate cancer.

Taking that into consideration, the relative survival rates for most kinds of prostate cancer are pretty good. Remember we're not counting men with prostate cancer who die of other causes:

70% of men with prostate cancer will survive more than five years after diagnosis.

Once prostate cancer has spread beyond the prostate, survival rates fall. Survival from prostate cancer is strongly related to the stage of the disease at diagnosis. For disease that is confined to the prostate, 90% of men live for five years or more, but if the disease is metastatic, the survival rate drops to 30%.

Staging, spread, and survival rates

As with all cancers, doctors use the term stage to describe how far prostate cancer has spread.

Staging systems are complicated. The staging system for most cancers, including prostate cancer, uses three different aspects of tumour growth and spread. It's called the TNM system, for tumour, nodes, and metastasis:

• T, for tumour, describes the size of the main area of prostate cancer.
• N, for nodes, describes whether prostate cancer has spread to any lymph nodes, and how many.
• M, for metastasis, means distant spread of prostate cancer, for example, to the bones or liver.