Mesothelioma Prognosis: Statistics

When mesothelioma is examined in purely statistical terms, the prognosis figures are discouraging. Pleural mesothelioma typically presents in an advanced stage of progression with a ten-to-fourteen month lifespan expectation from diagnosis. Peritoneal mesothelioma often presents with a slightly more optimistic lifespan expectation and patients surviving two to five years are not uncommon. However, after five years, statistics show survivability dropping to well below thirty percent.

Statistics, however, do not tell the whole story. There are a variety of factors in the development of a patient’s mesothelioma prognosis and subtle differences among these factors can have a dramatic impact on the course the disease will take. The statistical models used in mesothelioma often miss the extraordinary differences between a person’s stated prognosis/diagnosis and the way in which the disease actually impacts his or her life. While rare, it is not unknown for an individual to live for ten or sometimes even twenty years after a diagnosis of mesothelioma.
Mesothelioma Prognosis: Biology of the Disease

The most important disease-specific prognostic factors for patients with mesothelioma involve the form of mesothelioma as presented and thehistological subtype of the presented disease. Of the two major forms of mesothelioma, pleural mesothelioma generally presents with a worse prognosis than peritoneal mesothelioma does. The physiological reasons for this difference are not completely understood, but a major factor is the histological aspect of the cancer. Pleural mesothelioma presents about fifty percent of the time with an epitheloid histologic subtype, twenty percent of the time with sarcomatoid subtype and the remaining thirty percent is the biphasic subtype, which is a combination of the previous two subtypes. Peritoneal mesothelioma presents in the vast majority of diagnoses with the epitheloid subtype. This is significant because epitheloid mesothelioma responds more favorably to treatment than sarcomatoid mesothelioma or biphasic mesothelioma does. Thus, with the majority of peritoneal cases featuring the most treatable histological subtype, one would expect for it to have a better overall prognosis. Conversely, with only half of pleural cases involving the most treatable subtype, one would also expect a generally worse prognosis.
Mesothelioma Prognosis: Patient Status

Along with the biological aspects of mesothelioma as presented, another set of important prognostic factors includes the stage of the disease at diagnosis, the health of the patient and his or her age. All three will have a major impact on life expectancy and the future course of the disease.
Stage of the Disease
The stage of disease at diagnosis is a crucial factor in the development of the patient’s prognosis. As with all forms of cancer, early detection is important, but this is especially true of mesothelioma. Because mesothelioma generally resists curative treatment, doctors can manage the disease more efficiently if they have caught it in its early stages. The diffuse nature of the disorder means advanced tumor progression will invade large areas of tissue, making treatment even more difficult. Mesothelioma presents with symptoms shared by a number of other diseases and often goes undiagnosed because of these similarities. An early diagnosis is absolutely crucial if one hopes to control the disease.

By: bazaarchik

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