Kidney failure? People live a long time on dialysis but without it, they’d die.
Yeah, kidney failure is along the same lines, but dialysis is pretty inconvenient. I’m not sure I would consider that easy (but it’s probably better than death! :))
Asthma mentioned above is something that we probably don’t think about since it’s so easily treated. It’s common to forget that it could be a fatal condition otherwise.
What I was going to say. I wonder if some people think it’s a minor ailment and not possibly fatal.
I was shocked to hear someone say that his wife died of an asthma attack before I was diagnosed myself.
ninja’d
My wife’s thyroid gland died, but the lack is easily treatable. What is surprising is how hard it is to dose. Right now, she is alternating between 1.125 mg and 1.250 mg. Too much (1.250 every day) results in heart palpitations and too little in lethargy. She is monitored by measuring thyroid stimulating hormone.
Nava mentioned Haemophilia, that certainly fits the bill. Used to be fatal but can now be treated with clotting factors. Coeliac disease is treatable and probably causes earlier death if not, but I don’t think you’d call it fatal. But how about Addison’s disease? No cure, and an ‘Addisonian crisis’ can be fatal if untreated.
My understanding is that most CML patients lead fairly normal lives with the targeted drugs. The side effects are usually fairly mild, although there will always be a small fraction who have more severe reactions.
No cocktail of drugs with CML. One pill a day. And once the condition is under control, probably no more doctor’s visits than type-1 diabetes. The other drugs are because occasionally a drug will stop working (because the leukemia has had an additional mutation that blocks it) so they have to switch to a different drug.
I can’t take an anti cholinergic lung drug and my doctor once exclaimed that it was like treating me in the 1920s, “millions of people are alive and thriving today because of Spiriva” so perhaps smoking related severe COPD should be on the list.
No, not really.
Modern COPD treatments are better at reducing the symptoms, but they do little to modify the course of the disease, unfortunately. Lives are improved but not really extended, for the average COPD patient. Even pulmonary rehab, which has helped so many breathe easier, has not conclusively been shown to add to the lifespan.
Allergies and asthma vary considerably in how severe they are. In addition, there have been medicines for those for a long time, although none of the herbal ones were/are as effective as things like modern steroids. Also a lot of nonesense treatments back in the past, just like a lot of any medical science in the past was nonsense.
I mentioned auto-immune problems. Severe allergies/asthma are immune system problems so that sort of covered them.
Unfortunately, having mild intermittent asthma (defined as having 2 or fewer attacks per week) is not automatically protective against having a fatal asthma attack. They may be infrequent but they can still be fatal. 3000 to 5000 people die every year in the US from asthma attacks.
Or worse - they are left permanently brain-damaged. When I lived in my old town, I met a family whose daughter was left in the state of locked-in syndrome as a result of an asthma attack when she was a teenager. She was fully conscious and aware of everything that was going on around here, but unable to communicate or do anything for herself.
Her parents left their previous jobs and founded this company.
Bladder cancer. With treatment, it becomes a chronic condition. A cousin has had it for decades. It occurs, he gets a “root-rooter” treatment and chemo, it subsides, and some years later, it comes back, and is treated again. This has gone on for at least three decades, if not four. So I think this counts.
This is so sad.
Well, yes, as someone with mild intermittent asthma who has nonetheless twice landed in the ER due to allergies/asthma I do understand that. However, I read the OP as looking for conditions that require daily treatment of some sort, like diabetes. Asthma doesn’t always require that (although probably more asthmatics should take something daily than do so, but that’s getting into all sorts of tangents)
I’ve got Atrial Fibrillation, which I treat with Warfarin to thin my blood and a drug which helps regulate my heart rhythm. Without these I could get a clot from pooling blood at any time.
It’s been at least 10 years, and no impact on my life - except sometimes I think the phone in my shirt pocket is vibrating when it isn’t.
The OP doesn’t say daily; it says “on a regular basis.” Those of us who take methotrexate to treat lupus take the entire dose (6 tabs for me) once a week. Those taking Benlysta get infusions via IV every 4 weeks. And of course, some medications are taken daily.
So the question re: asthma is whether most patients have to use medication regularly but not necessarily daily.
People with untreated celiac or sprue are at a higher risk of lymphoma, and until recently, it was very misunderstood. It was thought to be a childhood disorder of fat digestion that kids usually outgrew; one “treatment” was a diet consisting mainly of bananas (which, granted, are gluten-free).