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: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:20PM
But we've got a great many cures to a great many cancers over the years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:46PM (27 children)
Kind of a macabre question but suicide alongside death from things like opiates have been sharply increasing. If somebody has cancer and then offs themselves, are they excluded from mortality rates? I mean this seems like something that could have a meaningful impact on these numbers especially if it turns out that those with cancer have a higher than normal rate of suicide or opiate abuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:48PM (1 child)
To put this another way if 5% more people with cancer kill themselves before dying of cancer, would that show a 5% reduced mortality rate from cancer?
Grr hitting the spam check thingy. Let me add some random sentence. Here's another one. Look at how lengthy and informative this comment is. How about a link. Know what company is truly cancer [soylentnews.org]?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:53PM
Correct, more people are dying of poisonings, etc in middle age instead of cancer at a later age:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2756187 [jamanetwork.com]
Btw, The cancer stats also leave out skin cancer :0.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:52PM (24 children)
Then you'd expect to find similar decrease in heart disease, accidents, and respiratory diseases, the other major sources in all-cause mortality, and you don't. The relative drop is unique to cancer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:55PM (20 children)
Then how is all-cause mortality increasing while cancer mortality is decreasing? In fact, other causes of death must be rising even faster than cancer is decreasing.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:00PM (19 children)
Accidents are up 4.2%, Alzheimers and Diabetes are up 2% each, the flu is up 6 fucking percent, suicide is up 5%.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:12PM (18 children)
Yes, so you agree that if the stats say people are dying earlier of other stuff they cannot die later due to cancer.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:14PM (17 children)
What exactly is your hypothesis? Cancer cases were up but cancer deaths are down. You're being silly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:18PM (14 children)
My hypothesis is that if people die from something else first they are unable to die from cancer. Do you need to check the statistical significance on that?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @07:09PM (13 children)
The math is pretty straightforward, and no, that's not a sufficient explanation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @07:55PM (12 children)
What math?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @08:02PM (11 children)
Oh there's hundreds of ways to you could break it down, but let's just take where X increase in suicides and Y decrease in cancer deaths, X<Y. Very complex math.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:04PM (10 children)
If the math shows there is an increase in all cause mortality but a decrease in cancer mortality, that means Y > X. Looks like Y is mostly people being poisoned by chronic medications too.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:11PM (9 children)
Do you think cancer is the magical life ender, where if you get past everything else, it's always cancer?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:29PM (8 children)
No, cancer rates in a given tissue peak when the tissue stem cells have undergone about log(1/n, base = 1 - p) divisions since fertilization. Where n is average number of accumulated "errors" required and p is the geometric mean of the probably of an error per division in that cell lineage. For most cancers it seems to work out to about 75 years old (at least in the SEER population), but of course p can be influenced by environmental factors, n can be influenced by genetic factors, etc.
People dying from other stuff before that peak will cut down on population cancer rates.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 09 2020, @11:02PM (7 children)
Being that I work directly in field of cancer genomics, I feel safe to say no, what the fuck are you talking about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @11:23PM
They don't teach you armitage doll in cancer genomics?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @11:26PM
Have you ever even looked at age specific mortality for various cancers? Or just age-adjusted, pop-adjusted crap like in this paper?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @02:31AM (4 children)
Do this simulation:
1) Get four quarters, call them A, B, C, D
2) Flip coin A until you have observed heads and record how many flips it took
3) Repeat step 2 for coins B:D
4) Record the *max* number of flips for that round
5) Repeat steps 2-4 until you have enough to see the distribution of max flips per round
6) Record the mode (most common # of flips required for all four coins to have turned up heads)
Each flip is a cell division, each coin is an "error" that is accumulating (usually assumed to be a mutation to an oncogene or tumor suppressor gene or whatever). Eg, in this case we need to get 4 genes mutated, each with 50% chance of mutating each division.
It will have a peak at log(1/4, base = 0.5), that's why age specific cancer incidence peaks at a certain age. You'll find so much inane BS written about this "peak cancer age" but it is straight armitage doll. The above is a simplification of the full model (constant error rate, independent/irreversable errors, looks at divisions instead chronological age, etc), but should demonstrate the concept.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday January 10 2020, @01:35PM (3 children)
The problem isn't that I don't understand your gross simplification.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @03:48PM (2 children)
Well, it is just the armitage-doll model which many people have managed to understand. So it is probably that you are trained in genomics which in my experience is a very unscientific field. It is a bunch of memorizing arbitrary "facts" instead of thinking scientifically.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday January 10 2020, @04:16PM (1 child)
God help you if you dare actually know the central dogma of biology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @05:41PM
Look, if you cannot understand the armitage-doll model (that cancer is due to accumulation of some kind of error) there is something wrong with how you have been trained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:21PM (1 child)
Also, cancer incidence has also been dropping since the early 1990s when they figured out the huge effect they could have on the stats with prostate screening.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:13PM
Can you screenshot the table?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @06:52PM (1 child)
Check out table 2 [cdc.gov] on the CDC cause of death's page.
Causes of death vary radically by age. If everybody suddenly dropped dead at age 40 you'd see a near 0 impact on deaths caused by accidents or homicides, yet you'd see a huge decline in cancer death rates.
As for the reason that other causes such as heart disease are not decreasing, that's also pretty easily explained. Cancer rates are roughly stagnant to slightly declining, largely as a result of people no longer smoking. So we can see the positive effect there in something like a vacuum. Things like heart disease, diabetes, etc are, on the other hand, very much not in a vacuum. Americans are getting ridiculously fat and so incidence rates of these things and increasingly early mortality from them have been skyrocketing. Something like 1 in 8 people who die ages 25-44 are dying of stroke/diabetes/heart disease. That's just insane. So the high-end gains due to people dying younger from other causes are being masked by ever younger deaths from diseases that used to be more for the elderly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:33PM
Sorry, this ended up in the wrong place. Can you screenshot the table?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @03:01AM
People with heart disease, respiratory diseases etc, are far less likely to suicide than cancer patients. Even if they remove it all, doctors will never say you are cured, it is always "in remission". That weighs on peoples' minds.
Heart attack victims are all "I survived! How can I improve my heart's health to avoid another attack?" whereas cancer patients are "It hasn't come back, yet". That's depressing. I've seen people slowly die on chemo, it's not a great incentive to linger on.
Not even going to comment on suicide to avoid accidents.
(Score: 1) by VacuumTube on Thursday January 09 2020, @05:13PM (6 children)
I wonder how much lower the overall cancer death rate would be if everyone could afford available treatments?
(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]
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Friday January 10 2020, @04:37PM
The good (?) news is that you only need to look at the data from any other developed nation in the world to get an answer to your question.
I'll give the Americans credit for one thing though, and that's being good at data collection. There's a lot of really good data gathered and published by Americans.