UK lags behind on cancer survival

ONDON (Reuters) - Cancer survival is improving in Europe but Britain and Denmark are lagging, with lower rates than countries that spend the same amount on health care, according to two new studies published on Tuesday.
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The latest Eurocare studies -- which include data from 83 cancer registries in 23 countries -- also suggest that wide differences in survival rates among countries are narrowing.

"Increases in survival and decreases in geographic differences over time, which are mainly due to improvements in health-care services in countries with poor survival, might indicate better cancer care," Italian researcher Franco Berrino and colleagues wrote in The Lancet Oncology.

Survival for the four most common cancers -- colorectal, lung, breast and prostate -- and ovarian cancer was best in central Europe and most Nordic states. South Europe was in the middle, followed by Britain and Ireland and then eastern Europe.

The researchers, using data on 2.7 million cancer patients, said if all countries had the mean survival rate of 57 percent of Norway, Sweden and Finland, there would be about 150,000 -- or 12 percent -- fewer deaths in the five years after diagnosis.

They also mostly found, as expected, the more a country spent on health care, the better its survival rates, except for in Britain and Denmark.

In Britain, the five-year survival rate was about 42 percent for men and 52 percent for women, versus the European average of about 45 and 55, respectively.