Cancer: data and developments
Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death worldwide with approximately 9-10 million deaths annually.
In 2020, 19,800,000 new cases were diagnosed worldwide and it is predicted that by 2050, 25,000,000 people will be diagnosed with cancer each year.
Early diagnosis is the most important therapeutic intervention which has led to a 40% reduction in mortality from breast cancer, 53% from prostate cancer and 52% from colon cancer over the last 30 years.
In our country, only 1% of the total expenditure on oncology is dedicated to early diagnosis, and this results in only 11% of cancers being diagnosed during a check-up, when in Europe this percentage reaches 25%.
Finally, in a percentage of 50%, the diagnosis of cancer in the Greek patient was made during a check-up for some other health problem.
It is worth noting that Greeks are concerned about cancer, but not about the risk factors that cause it.
They know about the disease but do not implement programs for smoking cessation, exercise, dietary habits and changing daily life.
At the Athens Medical Group, the implementation of new technology programs leads to an improvement and increase in survival expectancy in cancer cases that were characterized as incurable or terminal.
For example, in the three-year period 2017-2020, at the Clinic for Peritoneal Malignancy & Surgical Oncology Treatment at the Athens Medical Center and the Peritoneal Malignancy Treatment Unit at the Interbalkan Medical Center of Thessaloniki, a large number of oncological cases were treated, including locally advanced intraperitoneal neoplasm, pancreatic or biliary tract cancer or advanced ovarian cancer.
The implementation of a series of new surgical oncology techniques such as PIPAC or HIPEC or IRE’S (in the pancreas-liver) gave an increase in survival by 26 months in 68% of patients in cases where the expected survival was 5 months.
This result offered the opportunity to 2/3 of these patients to benefit from new drugs, targeted therapies or new radiotherapy techniques that did not exist or were not applied 3 or 4 years ago.
It is important not to forget that early diagnosis is the most important therapeutic intervention and to realize that even in the difficult period we are experiencing, we should never neglect our health.
