Cancer Survival in Germany after the fall of the Iron Curtain
Two decades after the fall of the Wall, cancer survival rates in East and West Germany have become almost equal. This is reported in a recent study by a team of epidemiologists from the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) and eleven German cancer registries.
Bild lear_21, Wikimedia Commons
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Data from the 1970s and 1980s show that people affected by cancer survived significantly longer in West Germany than cancer patients behind the Iron Curtain. Looking at a diagnosis period from 1984 to 1985 in the former German Democratic Republic, 28 percent of colorectal cancer patients, 46 percent of prostate cancer patients, and 52 percent of breast cancer patients survived the first five years after diagnosis. By contrast, 5-year survival rates for people in West Germany affected by these types of cancer were 44 percent, 68 percent, and 68 percent in the years from 1979 to 1983 already.
Led by Dr. Lina Jansen and Prof. Hermann Brenner from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), a team of scientists from DKFZ and the Association of Population-based Cancer Registries in Germany (GEKID) has now studied for the first time how survival rates developed in Germany in the second decade after Germany’s reunification. The new study is based on over one million cancer cases from Germany’s eleven population-based state cancer registries, which covered approximately 40 percent of the German population in the period studied.
The group analyzed cancer survival rates in the years from 2002 to 2006. They found that 5-year survival rates for 20 out of 25 cancer types differed by less than three percent between East and West and may therefore be regarded as almost identical.
Only for cancers of the oral cavity, the esophagus and the gall bladder as well as for melanoma, cancer patients in former West German states had statistically significantly higher 5-year survival rates. On the other hand, people living in the former East German states had a slight survival advantage for leukemias.
“The fact that cancer survival rates have aligned in the former West and East German states demonstrates that the standardized health system has created comparable health chances for people in the East and in the West. The dramatic differences in cancer survival rates have almost entirely disappeared, even though economic conditions continue to be different,” says Hermann Brenner. “However, it makes more sense now to compare socio-economic differences within individual regions than to think in those obsolete categories of East and West.”
Lina Jansen, Adam Gondos, Andrea Eberle, Katharina Emrich, Bernd Holleczek, Alexander Katalinic, Hermann Brenner and GEKID’s Cancer Survival Working Group: Cancer survival in Eastern and Western Germany after the fall of the Iron Curtain. European Journal of Epidemiology 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s10654-012-9723-5
With more than 3,000 employees, the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) is Germany’s largest biomedical research institute. DKFZ scientists identify cancer risk factors, investigate how cancer progresses and develop new cancer prevention strategies. They are also developing new methods to diagnose tumors more precisely and treat cancer patients more successfully. The DKFZ's Cancer Information Service (KID) provides patients, interested citizens and experts with individual answers to questions relating to cancer.
To transfer promising approaches from cancer research to the clinic and thus improve the prognosis of cancer patients, the DKFZ cooperates with excellent research institutions and university hospitals throughout Germany:
The DKFZ is 90 percent financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and 10 percent by the state of Baden-Württemberg. The DKFZ is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers.
