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Cancer Mortality Continues Steady Decline, Driven by Progress against Lung Cancer:
The cancer death rate declined by 29% from 1991 to 2017, including a 2.2% drop from 2016 to 2017, the largest single-year drop in cancer mortality ever reported. The news comes from Cancer Statistics, 2020, the latest edition of the American Cancer Society's annual report on cancer rates and trends.
The steady 26-year decline in overall cancer mortality is driven by long-term drops in death rates for the four major cancers -- lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate, although recent trends are mixed. The pace of mortality reductions for lung cancer -- the leading cause of cancer death -- accelerated in recent years (from 2% per year to 4% overall) spurring the record one-year drop in overall cancer mortality. In contrast, progress slowed for colorectal, breast, and prostate cancers.
Let's hope progress accelerates with CRISPR and other new tools.
Journal Reference:
Rebecca L. Siegel, Kimberly D. Miller, Ahmedin Jemal. Cancer statistics, 2020. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 2020; DOI: 10.3322/caac.21590
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @07:08PM (4 children)
When I was trying to determine whether early screening was a good idea or not, I worked out the exact math on years of life with/without it. It worked out to be 1 year of life, on average, for early screening + treatment. It might make sense if you have a history of genetic cancer in your family since that 1 year average would be somewhat better, but the hassle and the stress of possible false positives make it a net negative otherwise in my opinion. Like the paper says the big gains didn't come from better treatment but mostly from people no longer getting as much cancer. That's going to be largely because of people quitting smoking, and also people dying at earlier ages from suicide/drugs. So I don't expect you'd really see much statistical difference at all.
Ultimately there's a pretty good chance you're going to get cancer during your life. And there's also a pretty good chance you're going to die from it. This is true whether you're Paul Allen or David Koch able to afford the best money can buy, or Jamal Williams taking a greyhound to the free university medical center. Great care there by the way - that's how my mother got over her cancer. And I expect there will probably never be a cure for cancer until we can develop nanotech working as programmable white blood cells. But we're many decades, if not centuries, away from that becoming a reality. And suffice to say I'd rather not be the first to let some armed nanites cruise around in my body.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @07:10PM (3 children)
Type on the above *LESS than one year of life on average - substantially less. And that was for breast cancer, where early screening is supposed to be at its most valuable.
It is really not worth it unless you put no value on your time and/or money, or mental state following what would, more likely than not, be a false positive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @07:44PM (2 children)
One of the top four is colorectal cancer. Much of this can be prevented by a colonoscopy and removal of any pre-cancer polyps that are found. A lot of colorectal cancers can be prevented completely via colonoscopy. And if more people got over the stigma of having one, even more colorectal cancer could be avoided.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @12:00AM
It's not the stigma.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @12:10AM
Colonoscopies cause cancer (anything that damages tissue and triggers the need for cell division causes cancer). Have fun!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26827612 [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25416064 [nih.gov]