[DanBC]

5 year survival is not a particularly useful statistic though. Those people are not living longer, they're being diagnosed earlier. The all cause mortality hasn't been changed. Rates of regret for cancer treatment are quite high - people at the end of their life sometimes wish they'd spent more time doing stuff with family and less time getting unpleasant and painful treatment in hospital.

If you take every man over the age of 55 and provide rigorous diagnosis for prostate cancer, but you then provide zero treatment to anyone, your 5 year survival rates suddenly look really good. This is because you've diagnosed a lot of slow growing cancer that doesn't kill people. But obviously you've done nothing to improve all cause mortality or quality of life.

https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/98/24/1761/2521971

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5454760/

> Our findings suggest that there are no reliable relationships between changes in 5-year survival and cancer incidence or mortality. Increases in 5-year survival might therefore represent poor indicators of progress in cancer control at the population level. In the absence of over-diagnosis, 5-year survival might only indicate improved diagnosis and treatment in clinical practice.