Several factors combine to help determine the prognosis or outlook for recovery from breast cancer. Even so, a prognosis is never exact and people defy the odds all the time. Breast cancer prognosis and the range of treatment options depend mainly on the following:

• the stage of the cancer at the time of diagnosis (related to the size of the tumor and whether it has spread to lymph nodes or other places in the body)
• the type of breast cancer (invasive ductal carcinoma, etc)
• presence or absence of estrogen and progesterone receptors in the tumor tissue
• whether or not the tumor cells overexpress (have high levels of) the HER2-neu protein
• how fast the tumor seems to be growing
• age, general health, and menopausal status at diagnosis
• whether the cancer is being first diagnosed or has recurred

While the overall outlook for recovery depends on all the factors mentioned above, there are some general statistics on the prognosis for long-term survival based on the stage your cancer is in at the time of diagnosis. There are several ways of looking at the prognosis for recovery but most cancer statistics are reported as a “survival rate” over a given period of time, usually 1, 3, 5, 10, or 20 years. These statistics report the percentage of people who survive for a given length of time after their diagnosis. You can also look at this figure as the chance that a given person will live that length of time, but it is important to remember that this information is just an average and many people will have outcomes that are very different from the expected prognosis.

In general, the 20 year survival rate for women diagnosed with any stage of breast cancer is predicted to be somewhere between 60-70%, meaning the majority of those with a breast cancer diagnosis will likely live full lives. According to the American Cancer Society, the five year relative survival rates for cancer diagnosed in stage 0 or 1 is nearly 100%; for stage IIA it’s 92%; for stage IIB it’s 81%; for stage IIA it’s 67%; for stage IIB it’s 54%; and for stage IV it’s 20 %. It is important to note that all of these numbers have gone up dramatically in the past 20 years due to improved detection methods and treatments. Also, it is clear from looking at the numbers why early detection is important: If the cancer is caught before it spreads thought the body, there is a better than 50% chance of surviving five years; if not, on average only one in five women will survive that long.