From the Journals

Long view shows doubling of survival in non-Hodgkin lymphoma


 

FROM JAMA

Five-year survival for patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma has more than doubled since the early 1950s, according to Ali H. Mokdad, PhD, and his associates.

Data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program show that the 5-year relative survival rate for non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the United States went from 33% in 1950-1954 to 71.2% in 2008-2013, an increase of 116%, Dr. Mokdad and his associates reported (JAMA 2017;317[4]:388-406).

Five-year survival up 116% for non-Hodgkin lymphoma
Not all of that trend was mirrored by mortality, however, as the death rate “was essentially unchanged between 1980 (8.3 deaths per 100,000) and 2014 (8.3 deaths per 100,000),” they noted in another part of their study that used deidentified death records from the National Center for Health Statistics and population counts from the Census Bureau, the NCHS, and the Human Mortality Database.

In 2014, mortality for non-Hodgkin lymphoma was the 7th highest among the 29 cancers included in the study, and more than 487,000 years of life were lost, which put it 6th among the 29 cancers, said Dr. Mokdad and his associates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle.

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