Survival Rate

An experimental cancer drug shrank prostate tumors dramatically and more than doubled survival in 70% to 80% of patients with aggressive cancers, British researchers reported Tuesday. Although the study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology covered only 21 patients, the drug is now being tested in more than 250 men with what appears to be similar results, experts said.

As breast cancer ravaged her body, Susan G. Komen asked her younger sister for a promise. Komen wanted to help "cure this disease." After a three-year struggle, the vivacious young mother with the bright smile died in 1980. She was 36. Her sister, Nancy Brinker, kept her promise to do something, founding the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation two years later. "I knew it had to be big. We had to change a culture," Brinker said.

USC University Hospital in Los Angeles said Thursday that it has changed the way it selects liver transplant patients, the same day a new report showed that its liver program continued to have one of the worst survival rates in the nation. Just 77.3% of USC's liver transplant patients were still alive a year after surgery, according to national transplant statistics released Thursday. Based on the condition of its patients and organs, USC was expected to have a survival rate of 83.3%.

The use of advanced CT imaging to detect lung tumors in their still-treatable early stages greatly increases survival rates, and smokers should be routinely screened just as women are for breast cancer, according to a report today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Imaging yielded an estimated 10-year survival rate of more than 90%, researchers said. Currently, about 5% of the 174,000 lung cancer patients diagnosed each year survive for 10 years.

About a fifth of federally funded transplant programs fail to meet the government's minimum standards for patient survival or perform too few operations to ensure competency, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has allowed 48 heart, liver and lung transplant centers to continue operating despite sometimes glaring and repeated lapses, the newspaper's review found. There are 236 approved centers nationwide.

THE saucers are gone. Their big lights have stopped flashing. Any sea monsters emerging from the deep have long since returned there. The brief science-fiction flare-up of the 2005-06 network TV season is over. Inspired by the success of the serialized ABC mystery "Lost," each big network started its own expensive, effects-laden new serial last fall, one of them even taking up the slot immediately after "Lost." None survived the season.

Re "How a Liver Unit Failed," Nov. 12 I was disappointed by your omission of the most relevant statistics describing the performance of the liver transplant program at the UCI Medical Center: the mortality and transplant rates compared to the national averages. According to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, the 2004 mortality rate per year on the waiting list at UCI was 0.18, whereas the expected mortality rate was 0.13, and this difference was not deemed statistically significant.

A decade-long study comparing conventional colon cancer surgery with "keyhole" surgery found identical success rates, disproving fears that tumors would be more likely to return if surgeons did not open up the patient's belly for a full view. In conventional surgery, doctors remove a cancerous colon segment through an eight-inch cut down the abdomen.

Radiation after surgery for early-stage breast cancer improves survival chances for most patients, according to a study that analyzed the case histories of more than 9,000 women. Two doctors evaluated the results of 15 international studies and found that women who omitted radiation therapy after surgery were dying at a rate 8.6% higher than women who had the radiation. A decision against radiation "may translate into a considerable survival disadvantage for patients," write Drs.

For children and adults, survival rates for many types of cancers have risen steadily over the last two decades. But missing in this success story are adolescents and young adults: They don't fare as well on average. Oncologists around the country are trying to draw attention to this discrepancy, setting up clinics for adolescent and young adult cancer patients. "We have these horrible diseases killing young adults. Why aren't we doing better?" says Dr.