Blood cancer prognosis

Any information you find out about the prognosis for a particular disease will be based on what happened to a large group of people over a particular period of time, so it can only give you a general picture. Even if two people have the same condition, their prognosis may be different.

It’s best to ask your healthcare team about your own prognosis, if you want to know more. Some people prefer not to know, and that’s OK too. If you are finding it difficult to bring up with your doctor, or are unsure what to say, call our Support service – our nurses can help you decide what questions to ask.

In general, your individual prognosis will depend on a number of things, including:

• your diagnosis, including the type of blood cancer and the results of specific tests
• the stage of the disease when you’re diagnosed
• the type of treatment you have
• your age, general fitness and any significant past medical history.

Even taking these things into account, the information your healthcare team gives you will be quite broad. It will be based on what has happened to people who have the same condition as you, but it’s important to remember that you may have a different experience.

Your prognosis might change over time too, for example if you have a good response to your treatment, or a new treatment is developed. If your condition changes, or if you’ve finished part of your treatment, you might want to ask your healthcare team if this has affected your prognosis.

Watch Senior Support Services Nurse Gemma and people with blood cancer talk about prognosis:

If you decide to search for information about prognosis, you may come across statistics called survival rates. These state the percentage of people surviving a disease over a set period of time – usually five years. For example, a five-year survival rate of 90% means that nine out of ten people with a particular condition are alive five years after their diagnosis.

Figures like these can seem alarming and confusing, but they are averages based on a large group of people’s experiences with the same disease. They don’t mean that 90% of people with that disease will only live for five years, or that 90% of people are cured after five years. They are guides to help doctors compare the general prognosis for different diseases, and give an idea of how well people with the same type of cancer have responded to their treatment in the past.

If you hear or read something about your prognosis that you don’t understand or that worries you, speak to our Support Services Team.

This page was last reviewed in February 2026. Next full review due February 2029. We may make factual updates to the information between reviews.

We would like to thank Clinical Nurse Specialist Emma Sedgwick for checking the clinical accuracy of this information.