Mesothelioma Life Expectancy
Mesothelioma can reduce your life expectancy, but its amount depends on factors like your general health, stage and type of cancer cell. Discover the factors that influence the lifespan of people with this cancer. Life expectancy is the estimated number of years that a person should live. In the United States, the average life expectancy is about 78 years, but cancers caused by asbestos, such as mesothelioma and lung cancer, often shorten life.Physicians estimate life expectancy by looking at statistics on the survival time of people with mesothelioma. According to an international study conducted in 2013, mesothelioma reduces life expectancy by about 17 years. Most people over the age of 65 have been diagnosed with mesothelioma, but some have been diagnosed in their fifties or earlier. Younger diagnosed people may lose more years of life expectancy.
A number of things, including lifestyle and environmental factors, can affect the life of a person with mesothelioma. Decades of research have revealed three factors that significantly affect the life expectancy of mesothelioma: your general health, the type of cancer cell and its stage of diagnosis.
How is life expectancy affected by cell type?
Mesothelioma tumors consist of epithelial or sarcomatoid cells, or a mixture of both, called biphasic. People with epithelial tumors tend to live longer than people with sarcomatoid tumors - more than seven months older. The longest survival was observed in patients with an epithelial cell subtype called tubulopapillary. These participants lived 6.5 months longer than those with other epithelial subtypes.How is your life expectancy affected by your general health?
Exposure to asbestos can cause cancer in anyone, regardless of one's general health. Although mesothelioma strikes people in good and bad health, healthy people tend to live longer with the disease.Some factors may reduce life expectancy, including a sedentary lifestyle, poor nutrition, mental health problems and fragile social connections. Exposure to toxins such as cigarette smoke, radon and asbestos can also affect a person's life expectancy.
People whose ECOG performance score is low, indicating better overall health, tend to live longer with mesothelioma than those with a high score. An extensive study conducted in the late 1980s and 1990s revealed an overall survival of 11 months for those with a performance score of zero, 7.6 months for a score of 1 and 3.3 months for a score of 3. Taking good care of yourself by eating well and staying active when possible can help people recover more quickly from cancer treatments such as surgery and chemotherapy.
How is life expectancy affected by the stage of cancer?
One of the first things doctors do after the diagnosis of mesothelioma is to attribute a stage of development to cancer. They want to know if the disease has progressed in the body and, if so, to what extent. They consider that staging is important because it lays the foundation for the continuation - of the treatment plan.Cancer treatments, such as aggressive surgery and chemotherapy, are more effective against early-stage cancers and offer only life-saving benefits for advanced cancers. Physicians carefully evaluate the stadium to ensure the next most effective steps.
Calculating the stage of a cancer can be complex, and this is especially true in the case of asbestos-related cancers, because a surgical procedure is necessary to obtain a truly accurate assessment. Most people do not develop mesothelioma symptoms until the cancer has progressed. This trend explains why so many diagnoses are in stage III or IV and why few patients are entitled to surgery.
Oncologists manage advanced-stage patients with symptom-relieving therapies and, hopefully, prolong survival Specialists can treat patients at an early stage more aggressively and with more treatments, which will increase their expectancy life.