Acute Myeloid Leukemi Symptoms And Treatment - 1866 Words

Connor Stockman Bio 325 12/2/14 Acute Myeloid Leukemia This year in the United States there will be an estimated 1,665,540 diagnosed cancer cases and 585,720 deaths due to the disease.1 Cancer ranks as the second most common cause of death in the US only behind heart disease. As cancer accounts for nearly a quarter of all deaths in the United States2, many people view the diagnosis of cancer as a death sentence. This feeling of hopelessness can lead patients to make questionable decisions regarding treatment options. While current advances have led to increasingly positive prognoses for those diagnosed with differing forms of cancer, the significant death rate among those same patients may deter cancer patients from seeking traditional therapies and treatments. What people often times do not realize is that most of these alternative forms of treatment that have not been proven to be effective may be more detrimental to patients’ health than the actual cancer itself. In order to fully understand the effectiveness of the treatments that a patient is going to receive, it is important to look not only the physiological effects of the treatments themselves, but also the effects of the disease. Each year in the United States roughly 2.4 per every 100,000 Americans under the age of 65 are diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, and 12.6 per 100,000 are diagnosed over the age of 65 10. Up until the 1970s the five year survival rates for affected patients was less than 15 percent.