Breast cancer: Most early-stage cancer patients will become long-term survivors, study shows

Some of the potential drivers in the improvement in survival rates could include new treatments, improved radiotherapy, and better detection and breast screening

Most women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer can expect to become "long-term survivors", according to a new study.

For some women the risk of death within five years is as low as 0.2 per cent, according to the large-scale research.

The proportion of women who survive the disease has improved substantially since the 1990s, experts found.

A NHS worker studies a breast cancer scan

Cancer Research UK, which funded the study, said the figures were "heart-warming" and will come as reassuring news to women with breast cancer.

Researchers, led by academics at the University of Oxford, tracked survival rates in half a million women diagnosed with breast cancer in England between 1993 and 2015. The authors mostly examined cases where breast cancer had not spread beyond the breast.

They then tracked the cases to assess their risk of death five years after their diagnosis – when the risk of death from breast cancer was found to be highest.

They found women diagnosed between 2010 and 2015 were 66 per cent less likely to die from the disease within five years compared to those diagnosed in the 1990s.

A woman's risk of death within five years of diagnosis was 14.4 per cent when they were diagnosed between 1993 and 1999.

This fell substantially to 4.9 per cent for women diagnosed between 2010 and 2015, according to the study, which has been published in the BMJ.

"The prognosis for women diagnosed with early invasive breast cancer has improved substantially since the 1990s," the authors wrote. "Most can expect to be long-term cancer survivors."

Dr Carolyn Taylor, professor of oncology at Oxford Population Health and lead author of the paper, said: "Our study is good news for the overwhelming majority of women diagnosed with early breast cancer today because their prognosis has improved so much.

"Their risk of dying from their breast cancer in the first five years after diagnosis is now 5 per cent.

"It can also be used to estimate risk for individual women in the clinic. Our study shows that prognosis after a diagnosis of early breast cancer varies widely, but patients and clinicians can use these results to predict accurate prognosis moving forward.

"In the future, further research may be able to reduce the breast cancer death rates for women diagnosed with early breast cancer even more."