Can someone help me understand my cancer math results

chgogemini

Breast Cancer Treatment Outcome Calculator

CancerMath Breast Cancer Tools All Cancers About

Outcome Conditional Survival Therapy Nodal Nipple Involvement

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Factors affecting cancer lethality

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Classification: TxNxMx AJCC Stage: unknown

Cancer Mortality: 5.9% expected 15-year Cancer Death Rate.

6% 15-year Kaplan-Meier cancer death rate

Life Expectancy:

Without therapy, this cancer shortens the life expectancy of a 39-year-old woman by 4.5 years. (from 42.9 years to 38.4 years

Therapy benefit:

The therapy selected would improve average life expectancy by 2.4 years, or

871 days over expectancy without therapy.

52.4% fewer cancer deaths after 15 years

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curveball

When I use cancermath I usually select the pictogram view. This will show you 100 faces, color coded to show the number who would survive with no treatment (I think this probably means surgery only rather than absolutely no treatment), the number who die of cancer, the  number who die of other causes, and the number of additional survivors when your treatment of choice is added. These last are the green smilie faces "additional alive w/ therapy". I find this way of looking at the results a lot easier to grasp than trying to understand what a change in life expectancy of 871 days might mean for me. For my diagnosis, adding hormone tx plus chemotherapy meant there were ten green smilies--ten more in a hundred similar patients than without those two treatements. Hope I'm one of them!

The other number that I find easy to grasp is the "percent fewer cancer deaths in 15 years". Your results above show greater than 50%. In other words, whatever therapy you were looking at cut your chance of dying from cancer in half--actually a little better than that.

One other thing, I just took a look at your profile and you show more diagnostic info there, like your tumor size and your nodal, hormone and HER2 status, than is included in the data above. I don't know whether you entered your actual info into cancermath and it somehow didn't transfer, or if you didn't have that information yet when you used cancermath. But I think in general, the more information you put in cancermath, the better the results will reflect what can be expected with your specific diagnosis.

chgogemini

Thanks curveball :-) ill try the pictograph.