There is increasingly more life before, during and after cancer

There are hundreds of diseases of this type that affect almost 300,000 people in Spain every year; figures that are now suggesting the concept of living with the disease.

BY Enric Ros | 10 January 2024

The word “cancer” is one of the most feared by many patients who visit doctors and hospitals. The English expression ‘the C-word’ has been used to allude to a swear word in English, but also to refer to this disease, which has been turned into a virtually unmentionable taboo for a long time. However, increasingly, in our society we are aware that cancer no longer has to mean an end to life, but rather an unavoidable, complicated process that we must face up to and that it is possible, in a great many cases, to successfully overcome it.

If we go over the situation of the past few decades, recently the magazine The European Journal of Epidemiology published a study that confirmed how life expectancy has increased over the past twenty-five years in European countries thanks to the progresses made in the treatment and prevention of cancer, as well as those for cardiovascular diseases. In September of this year, the economist Frank R. Lichtenberg also published research carried out in Spain between 1999 and 2016 in Value in Health that allows us to conclude that the life expectancy of cancer patients in our country has increased by 2.77 years during the period studied (in 96% of the cases, thanks to the treatments using new drugs.)

The right to forget cancer

Cancer patients do not only face up to the physical and psychological impact caused by the disease, but also they often suffer from a loss of their rights as citizens. The cases of discrimination when taking out a bank product, for example, or insurance are frequent. As indicated by the report Young people and leukaemia: beyond survival, by the Fundación Josep Carreras, up to 80% of people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five who have suffered from blood cancer find it difficult to take out these services.

For Antoni Baena, professor of Health Science Studies at the UOC, the system must protect all these people to prevent “the fact of having suffered from a cancer from turning you into a disadvantaged citizen.” Fortunately, this is something that has started to change in recent times. In a resolution passed last year, the European Parliament imposed 2025 as a limit for establishing the right to forget cancer in its member countries, guaranteeing that financial and insurance organisations cannot take into account the medical history of cancer patients who are survivors ten years after the end of their treatment (and five years, for patients whose diagnosis was carried out before they turned eighteen). Today, most countries have legislation regarding this aspect and the Spanish government passed the relevant legislation last June 2023.