Understanding your breast cancer prognosis
A breast cancer prognosis is the likely outcome or course of breast cancer. It may be helpful to think of a prognosis as an estimate or prediction. Understanding your prognosis will help you talk with your doctor and make decisions about treatment.
Many factors affect your breast cancer prognosis, including:
- Type of breast cancer, such as ductal carcinoma in situ, invasive ductal carcinoma, inflammatory breast cancer, and triple-negative breast cancer. Learn about types of breast cancer.
- The size of the tumor and whether it has spread beyond the breast tissue to the lymph nodes or to other places in the body.
- Tumor grade, which describes how abnormal the cells look under the microscope, as well as how fast they are likely to grow and spread.
- Biomarker status, in particular whether your tumor has receptors for the hormones estrogen and/or progesterone or has high levels of a protein called HER2. Learn about breast cancer biomarkers.
- Personal factors, such as your age, medical history, family history, menopausal status, and ethnicity.
- Treatment response, in particular how your cancer responds to treatment given before surgery.
- Results from gene expression tests such as OncotypeDX, Mammaprint, or Breast Cancer Index. These tests, which are also called gene expression profiling or multigene tests, help predict the chances that cancer will spread or come back after surgery.
Your doctor may tell you that you have a certain prognostic stage—stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, or stage 4. The prognostic stage combines information about several of the prognostic factors listed above, including the size and spread of the tumor, tumor grade, whether it has estrogen and/or progesterone receptors and HER2, and its score on a gene expression test. Learn more about Breast Cancer Stages.
As part of a discussion of breast cancer prognosis, your doctor can tell you about the chance that your cancer will return after treatment and how different treatments might affect that chance. To learn more about breast cancer recurrence and how it is diagnosed and treated, visit Recurrent Breast Cancer.
Survival statistics for breast cancer
Doctors estimate breast cancer prognosis by using statistics collected over many years from people with breast cancer. One commonly used statistic is the 5-year relative survival rate. This statistic tells you what percentage of people with the same type and stage of breast cancer are alive 5 years after their cancer was diagnosed, compared with people in the overall population.
The most recent 5-year relative survival rates for female breast cancer from NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program, representing the period 2013–2019, are as follows:
- For all types of breast cancer combined, 90.8%
- For all types of breast cancer, based on how far breast cancer has spread at the time of diagnosis,
- 99.3% for localized breast cancer (cancer is found only in the breast tissue and has not spread to nearby lymph nodes or other parts of the body)
- 86.3% for regional breast cancer (cancer has spread beyond the breast tissue to nearby lymph nodes or organs)
- 31% for distant breast cancer (cancer has spread, or metastasized, from the original tumor to distant locations in the body; this is sometimes referred to as stage 4 or metastatic breast cancer)
- For subtypes of breast cancer, based on hormone receptor and HER2 biomarkers,
- 94.8% for HR+/HER2- breast cancer (localized, 100.0%; regional, 90.2%; distant, 34.0%)
- 91.0% for HR+/HER2+ breast cancer (localized, 99.1%; regional, 89.8%; distant, 45.6%)
- 85.6% for HR-/HER2+ breast cancer (localized, 97.2%; regional, 84.0%; distant, 39.5%)
- 77.6% for HR-/HER2- (triple-negative) breast cancer (localized, 91.8%; regional, 66.2%; distant, 12.8%)
Talking with your doctor to make sense of cancer statistics
Because survival statistics are based on large groups of people, they cannot be used to predict exactly what will happen to you. Your doctor can help you understand how these statistics relate to your own situation.
When reviewing survival statistics, it’s important to keep in mind that:
- responses to cancer treatment vary, even among women with the same type of breast cancer who are receiving the same treatment.
- it takes several years to see the effect of newer and better treatments, so the positive impact of improved treatments may not be reflected in current statistics.
Learn more about a cancer prognosis and watch videos of people with cancer talking with their doctor in Understanding Cancer Prognosis.
Additional breast cancer statistics
NCI’s SEER program provides additional breast cancer statistics, including statistics on incidence, lifetime risk, prevalence, and deaths. Statistics are available for different racial and ethnic groups and different age groups.