Better treatment options have improved survival rates in the U.S., according to a report from the American Cancer Society.

A nuclear medicine technologist administers a PET-CT scan to determine whether a patient is clear of cancer at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora in 2024.Kevin Mohatt for The Washington Post via Getty Images file

The U.S. has reached a watershed moment in the fight against cancer: Seven in 10 people now survive five years or more after diagnosis, according to the latest annual report from the American Cancer Society.

That`s a big improvement since the 1970s, when only half of those diagnosed lived at least five years. In the mid-1990s, the rate was 63%.

The 70% figure is based on diagnoses from 2015 to 2021. The findings were published Tuesday in the American Cancer Society`s medical journal, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Five years is the most common benchmark for measuring cancer survival, since the risk of certain cancers` recurring declines significantly if the cancers haven`t come back within that time.

Thanks to improved treatment options over the last decade, many cancers have gone from death sentences to chronic diseases, according to the report`s lead author, Rebecca Siegel, the American Cancer Society`s senior scientific director of surveillance research.

"It takes decades for research to understand and develop these more effective treatments, and now we`re seeing the fruits of those investments," Siegel said.

The report estimates that 4.8 million cancer deaths were prevented from 1991 to 2023, largely because of better treatments, earlier detection methods and reductions in smoking.

Siegel said scientists have a greater understanding of how cancer develops and spreads, allowing them to engineer the immune system to stop or slow cancer growth.

She highlighted immunotherapies as one of the biggest advances - the treatments help the immune system find and attack cancer cells. Immunotherapy has been "game changing" for myeloma, Siegel said. The five-year survival rate for the blood cancer, which is twice as common among Black people as in white people in the U.S., rose to 62% from 32% in the mid-1990s.

Targeted therapy, which targets specific genes or proteins that help cancer cells grow, has been another major advancement, as such treatments cause less damage to healthy cells and come with fewer side effects.

"Staying on treatment longer allows patients to live longer, and these less toxic treatments allow more sequences of therapy," said Dr. Christopher Flowers, head of cancer medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who wasn`t involved in the report.

Flowers said targeted therapies and immunotherapies have improved survival outcomes for lung cancer, which kills more people than any other cancer in the U.S. The five-year survival rate for regional lung cancer - which is found in the lung and nearby structures or lymph nodes - is now 37%, up from 20% in the mid-1990s.

However, further progress could be made by addressing major risk factors for cancer, said Dr. Clark Gamblin, a gastrointestinal surgeon at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and chief of surgical oncology at the University of Utah.

"Our country has an epidemic of obesity, and cancers follow that," said Gamblin, who wasn`t involved in the report. "So we`re not winning on every front."

Colorectal cancer rates are rising in people under age 50, and overall breast cancer rates are rising among women. Obesity can be a risk factor for both cancers.

Overall, the American Cancer Society estimates there will be more than 626,000 cancer deaths and more than 2.1 million newly diagnosed cases in the U.S. this year.

Siegel said she is concerned about scientists` ability to study new methods of prevention, detection and treatment, given recent cuts to cancer research by the Trump administration. An analysis from Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee found a 31% decline in cancer research grant funding in the first three months of 2025, compared with the same period in 2024.

"Other threats to progress are the enormous gap that we see in the cancer burden in people of color, specifically Native American people and Black people," Siegel said.

The same populations are among the most affected by the expiration of Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies, which could reduce access to cancer drugs, Siegel said.

Disruptions to cancer screening during the Covid pandemic could also have further effects, including late-stage diagnoses.

"The screening for [asymptomatic] cancer largely stopped during that time period, and I don`t know that we`ve seen the tail of that yet," Gamblin said.