Mesothelioma Prognosis

When an individual is diagnosed with mesothelioma, one of the first questions they will have is “How long do I have to live?” This is a scary question - and a hard one to ask - but one for which most cancer patients will eventually seek an answer.

It is very difficult for oncologists and members of a patient’s medical team to give a definitive answer to this query. Indeed, every case is different and cancer can be an unpredictable disease. Sometimes, cases that look hopeless turn out to be not so bleak. In other cases, cancers that don’t look so bad progress quickly and result in an untimely death.

Malignant mesothelioma is extremely aggressive and has a long latency period. Hence, cases are usually not detected until the disease has reached the advanced stages of cancer. As a result the prognosis for such patients is often not favorable; the mesothelioma survival rate following diagnosis is usually just a year or two. That doesn’t mean, however, that there won’t be exceptions, or that the outlook will not improve in years to come, especially as more and better treatments are developed. Overall, the prognosis has been improving for mesothelioma patients over these past few decades.