Women who survive breast cancer after having completed five years of what specialists call systemic therapy are exposed to a relatively low risk of the disease recurring, as reported by a U.S. study published on Tuesday.

Furthermore, researchers said that even women with stage III breast cancer have a low 13 percent risk of relapse if they survived the first five years without cancer.

Dr. Abenaa Brewster, a medical oncologist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, together with her team, evaluated 2, 838 breast cancer patients with disease stages from I to III. They had all been treated with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy or hormone therapy and remained disease-free for five years. A decade after being diagnosed, 89 percent of the patients remained recurrence free. Moreover, 15 years after the diagnosis, approximately 80 percent remained recurrence-free.

Only 216 women developed a relapse, Dr. Abenaa Brewster said. According to her findings, the risk varied by stage and tumor type. Women who had stage I disease were exposed to a 7 percent risk of recurrence, those who had stage II were exposed to an 11 percent risk and patients with stage III had a 13 percent risk.

In addition to this, the study also discovered that women who had tumors known as estrogen receptor positive were more predisposed to late recurrences than women who had other types of tumors. Even more surprising is the fact that women who had low-grade tumors were more likely to suffer disease relapses than those who had higher grade tumors.

The study findings were published on August 12 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.