If you take a quick look at non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and its prognosis, you can get pretty alarmed.
According to the American Cancer Society, the overall 5-year relative survival rate for patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is 63% and the 10-year relative survival rate is 51%.
My form, called follicular lymphoma that is low grade or indolent, has better prospects. So you may have to put up with me a lot longer!
In general, the average survival rate for follicular lymphoma is 7 - 10 years, depending on other risk factors. New drug treatments, particularly monoclonal antibodies, have significantly improved survival rates. According to a recent study, 91% of patients with follicular lymphoma now survive the first 4 years after diagnosis, compared with 69% of patients treated in the past with older types of drugs.
So I have a better prognosis than most because we caught it early, it is slow-growing (I may have already had it for ten years, see blog about 2003), and there are no symptoms, no known spreading to other organs. Robert Miller and many others have lived with it for over 20 years. That's what I intend to do.
This is a good summary:
http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/non-hodgkins-lymphoma/prognosis.html
FYI:
Do you know there are 80 kinds of lymphoma? Yowee! Wikipedia: The 2008 World Health Organization "lists over 80 different forms of lymphomas in four broad groups."
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