Although British citizens have excellent access to medical care, the country lags behind other countries when it comes to cancer survival rates according to a very large study.

The Eurocare-4 study looked at 2.7 million cancer patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999. Not only is that number statistically significant, it covered patients in 23 European countries.

Only 47 per cent of people in Britain who get the disease are alive after five years, compared with the European average of about 50 per cent.

Sufferers in the UK have a similar chance of recovering as those in the Eastern Europe, where money spent on healthcare is much lower, the figures show.

The British Government spends up to 1,500 pounds a person on healthcare — three times as much as the 500 pounds spent in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Poland.

More than 150,000 people die from cancer in Britain every year. The biggest killers are cancers of the lung, bowel, breast and prostate.

The results showed that Britain did in fact have below-average five-year cancer survival rates among the eight most common cancers. This seems to signal that the UK Department of Health’s cancer plan has in fact failed miserably.

“So has the cancer plan worked? The short answer is seemingly no,” an editorial in the journal ‘The Lancet’, which published the figures today, said.

The study marks the first time that Avastin has been tested against brain tumors, the researchers said. The drug, whose chemical name is bevacizumab, currently is used to treat lung and colorectal cancers. 

The researchers tested the effectiveness of Avastin in conjunction with a standard chemotherapy agent in patients with recurrent cancerous brain tumors called gliomas. They found that the two drugs together halted tumor growth up to twice as long as comparative therapies. Though gliomas remain incurable in nearly all cases, the combined drug therapy may buy precious time and preserve physical and mental function longer for patients facing this grim diagnosis, the researchers said.

“These results are exciting because of the possible implications for a patient population that currently has the poorest possible prognosis going into treatment, those with malignant brain tumors that have recurred after initial treatment,” said James Vredenburgh, M.D., a brain cancer specialist at Duke’s Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center and lead researcher on the study.

The findings will appear in the Feb. 20, 2007, issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Research Fund, the Bryan Cless Research Fund and Genentech, the maker of Avastin.

Duke currently is participating in a large, multi-institutional study of Avastin to corroborate the results of this initial study, Vredenburgh said.

Kate Carr, president and chief executive officer of Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure, a not-for-profit organization that supports research to hasten a cure for brain cancer, said, “The results of this initial study are very encouraging and we are now excited to learn the findings of the larger study, that, it is hoped, will lead to an approved therapy for patients with brain cancer.”

In the pilot study, the researchers found that dual therapy with Avastin and the chemotherapy drug irinotecan either shrank the tumors or restricted their growth in nearly all cases for up to three months longer than comparative therapies. Three months is a significant advance when dealing with these aggressive tumors, Vredenburgh said; common current treatment normally offers only six to 12 weeks of halted growth before the tumor grows and spreads, ultimately destroying cognitive and physical function and leading to death.

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