A lot of interesting news today about survival...

 Older White People Live Longer After Surgery: Elderly white patients have better survival rates than blacks after surgery at U.S. teaching-intensive hospitals, according to a new study in the Archives of Surgery. 

Researchers studied 4.6 millon surgical patients at 3,270 hospitals.  White patients had better outcomes than black patients, according to Dr. Jeffrey Silber, study leader and director of the Center for Outcomes Research at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. The survival advantage for white patiens resulted from lower death rates after complications, not from lower complication rates.

Liver Cancer Rates Triple While Survival Rates Increase: The incidence of liver cancer in the United States tripled between 1975 and 2005, according to a new study from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER). For the first time, one-to-five-year survival rates improved significantly for patients diagnosed with liver cancer, researchers found, in part because more patients were diagnosed at earlier stages, when treatment is more effective.