Someone asked, how long can cancer live without treatment?
I was wondering, why do you ask such a question? When you have cancer, you must first think of treatment, rather than caring about how long you can live without treatment. But when I thought about it, it was not surprising that this question was asked.
Sometimes, the patient's condition is no longer suitable for treatment, or because the patient is old or other special circumstances, he does not want to treat it, but he wants to know how long he can live without treatment so that he can know.
Some people may also be worried about the "side effects" brought by cancer treatment and dare not go to treatment (such as surgery, chemotherapy, etc.) and think about not treating it, so they hope to understand how long they can live without treatment. It means that if they can live without treatment, it will be better not to treat it.
The motivation of the latter type is a bit "dangerous". If you don't treat it, the problem will be big. You will miss the best treatment opportunity. You could have tried to cure it. If you lose the opportunity to cure, it will be too late to regret it.
No matter what the reason or motivation is, just analyze from this question itself: How long can cancer live without treatment?
Actually, this is a question that cannot be answered simply, and I will return to the question I often tell you: Don’t forget that cancer is actually not a disease, but a major category of diseases, including many different cancers. How to treat
, how to treat it, how long can you live... It is obvious that different cancers and different conditions are of course different, and you cannot simply mix them together.
How long can cancer live under treatment, and how long can cancer live without treatment are also very different.
1. Different types of cancer have different survival times.
The type mentioned here mainly refers to the pathological type, which reflects the biological characteristics of cancer (equivalent to the personality and temper of a person, different people are different). Some cancers grow slowly (the so-called lazy tumors), have low malignancy, and some cancers grow quickly, have high malignancy, and are extremely aggressive.
It is obvious that without treatment, the "lazy cancer" with slow growth and development survives for a long time, but it cannot be said that some survive for a few years, and some can even more than ten years. For example, some inert lymphomas can really survive for more than ten years without treatment (note that there are, not all). For highly malignant tumors that grow rapidly, such as pregnancy vesicular carcinoma and lymphoblastic lymphoma, if not treated, it develops very quickly, and the survival time is usually very short, several months, weeks or even only a few days. Of course, this means that if treatment is not treated, if treatment is actively regulated, these cancers may be cured, and their survival time may be decades, so it should be emphasized that this is just an analysis without treatment.
is also lung cancer. The natural survival time of small cells and non-small cell lung cancer (survival time without treatment) is of course different. For both non-small cell lung cancer, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma are also different.
is also breast cancer . ER/PR-positive breast cancer, HER-2-positive breast cancer, and triple-negative breast cancer are also different in all aspects. Of course, there are differences in survival time. Probably speaking, HR-positive breast cancer should have the longest survival time, and triple-negative breast cancer is the worst, but it also needs to be analyzed in combination with other factors such as staging. An absolute conclusion cannot be simply drawn.
2. Different installments have different survival times.
is best understood. For the same cancer, if the same cancer is not treated, the survival time of early staging is generally longer than that of later staging. An early cancer is only local and will not cause the patient to die suddenly, but will need to continue to grow, develop, spread and metastasize, and finally cause death. From early development to late stages, from late stages to death, it takes time.
For example, it is also breast cancer, Early breast cancer will generally not only last a few months until the end of death without treatment, because it will take time to develop to the late stage, and the final death is usually unlikely to die in only a few months, and may have a lifetime of several years. When some people heard this, it seemed to be good. But you have to know that if early breast cancer is actively treated with standardized treatment, it is very likely that it can be cured and can live for decades. Are you satisfied with living for only one year, two years or several years?
3. The patient's underlying diseases and physical fitness status are different, and his survival time is also different.
has the same cancer, and the stage is the same, and the same is not treated. Is the survival time the same? Of course not. There are other factors that can also affect survival time. For example, different patients have other diseases and their physical condition is also different, so of course it has an impact on survival time. So you will see that some patients with the same cancer and the same stages have left shortly after, while others have lived for quite a long time. One of the reasons may be that their physical condition is different.
4. In addition, different mentalities of cancer patients also have an impact on survival time.
mentality has a certain impact on the growth and development of cancer. A positive and optimistic attitude helps control the disease and helps to delay the growth and development of tumors. But be aware that this is only helpful, but not the main factor. Don’t think about not treating cancer but relying on a good attitude to solve the cancer. That is impossible. It is just that under the same conditions, people with good mentality will have better results. For example, people with good mentality may survive longer (not necessarily); people with good mentality will have better results if they are treated. But the factors of cancer itself (pathological type, staging, etc.) are more important, which one is the decisive factor.
Finally, I would like to remind again. Except for the rare cases, sometimes it can be temporarily not treated (note: it is still temporary, not always not treatment, and it is a rare case. Doctors need to strictly follow up and closely follow up). If you have cancer, you must treat it in a timely manner. Timely and standardized treatment. Some can strive for treatment, while others can significantly prolong survival time and survive with tumors.
