Bladder cancer is the 6th most common cancer and the 4th most common in men.
Men are 3-4 more times likely to get bladder cancer.
Bladder cancer has over 72,000 new cases each years and kills over 15,000 per year.
The ave. age of a bladder cancer person is 73 yrs old. 9 out 10 people are over 50 yrs old.
The National Cancer Institute spends only 23.4 million on bladder cancer research.
Bladder cancer has a reoccurrence rate of 50-80% and therefore requires life long surveillance. Because of this it is the most expensive cancer to treat on a per patient basis.
Over 20 % of bladder cancer cases are high grade muscle invasive.
The 5 yr. survival rate of stage 2b muscle invasive bladder cancer is 50%.
I hope I have all of these stats correct. My sources ACS, NCI, BCAN.
The treatment for bladder cancer has not changed in over 30 years. With my stage (2b) of bladder cancer, there is supposed to be 3 treatment options. This is very misleading. The 2 least invasive treatments are rarely performed because so few patients qualify for these procedures. For instance one of several requirements is that you must have only one single tumor in your bladder in only certain locations and no other signs of any other stages of cancer in your bladder. Well this is next to impossible for someone with high grade carcinoma. So in reality there is only one gold standard treatment for people like me with stage 2b bladder cancer. And I think it sucks.
