1. Read the article, or at least skim it before commenting. The rates listed are population normalized, it would be a very bizarre thing indeed if some other cause of death was preferentially killing people before they got old enough to die of cancer yet somehow still caused overall life expectancy to increase.
As you'll see, death rates for all age groups have been in decline across the board since 1991. People aren't dying due to obesity or diabetes instead of cancer, they're just dying less, mostly regardless of cause.
So please stop needlessly injecting your speculation and biases into the comments here, please only put forward arguments which are consistent with the well-established facts as we know them. Thanks.
>So please stop needlessly injecting your speculation and biases into the comments here, please only put forward arguments which are consistent with the well-established facts as we know them. Thanks.
What a truly strange thing to say.
"I elect myself thread moderator!"
Let's not act like needless comments and speculation don't have the potential to add to a topic of discussion, they do.
I doubt it has anything to do with treatment. On average we've been able to add a whopping four months to longevity since the '70s, and even that's questionable since we have better diagnostic equipment.
You were really, really lucky.
A drop in cancer deaths is probably related to two things: a drop in smoking, and an increase in obesity that's killing people before they can get cancer.
Sorry but how can you doubt anything when you have no idea of the details of this person's disease? I think it is a bit off colour for you to impose your ideas on their actual experience. There are definitely cancer types which used to be fatal but can now be cured with therapy in the majority of patients, such as advanced germ cell tumours. Google it.
I didn't mean his disease. I meant cancer treatment in general. When I said he was lucky I meant he was lucky given his diagnosis.
And yes, I'm aware there are curable cancers. Hell, there are skin cancers that have never been particularly dangerous. But the number of types that used to be deadly that we can now cure is a drop in the bucket. Like I said - four months. In the vast majority of cases we can keep you alive for a few months longer. Otherwise it may as well be 1970.
> Like I said - four months. In the vast majority of cases we can keep you alive for a few months longer.
Can you cite this? I suspect it's an average, and thus not very useful. (Ie: some people are living a lot longer, enough to drive the overall average up 4 months, not most people are living 4 months longer).
Highly recommended reading, BTW, though it's a bit depressing.
For the average to go up only four months either we're doing really well against a tiny percentage of cancers or we're doing generally a tiny bit better against most cancers. Or some combination of the two. Either way you look at it that's an indication of lack of progress.
Hold on there. There have been several major advances in the treatment of cancer. Take a look at the leukemias. CML used to be a death sentence. Now, you can take Gleevec and you'll eventually die, but it won't be because of the cancer anymore. That drug turned a rapidly fatal cancer into a chronic, treatable condition.
I suspect with no evidence to support that some of this may be related to people dying of other things instead on cancer such as heart disease, etc.
Another interesting fact is if you look at US deaths, fewer die between the age of 60 and 80 than before and after. Seems like if you can make it to sixty you'll die of old age or some random cancer.
> Another interesting fact is if you look at US deaths, fewer die between the age of 60 and 80 than before and after. Seems like if you can make it to sixty you'll die of old age or some random cancer
Medicaid kicks in at age 65. I suspect that people over 65 get disproportionately more funding which is why the US does well with people over that age.
No other cause went up to a meaningful degree in terms of death rates, which is what the submitted article mostly focused on. "The overall rate of deaths from cancer decreased from about 215 per 100,000 people in 1991 to about 169 per 100,000 people in 2011, researchers found." An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[1] Provides some of the background.
Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[2]
Yes, people all around the world eventually die of something, but they are dying at ever later ages after longer and longer spans of healthy living all around the world. That's why we can say that death rates are going down. As the link you found after your comment edit says, "Although single year improvements in mortality were often small, the age-adjusted risk of dying dropped 60 percent from 1935 to 2010."
After edit: another participant here in another comment links to CDC documents that plainly show the drop in all-cause death rates in the United States.
Wow this data is not easy to compare. In 1991 the death rate from Cancer was 514,657 out of 2,169,518 deaths (23.7%). In 2011 it was 575,313 out of 2,512,873 deaths (22.9%). This does not look like a 22% drop to me any way you dice the numbers.
Over the same time heart disease dropped from 720,862 in 1991 to 596,339 in 2011. This is much more impressive.
I think you and the news article are thinking of different statistics.
The metric described in the news article is deaths by cancer per 100,000 individuals.
What you calculated is the percentage of deaths due to cancer.
I don't have access to the scientific article that was the foundation of this news piece but it looks like the reduction in death rate was not the authors' main point [1].
Yes it looks like they are using the age adjusted rate. The problem is it looks like almost most causes of death have fallen in an age adjusted rate by about 20% also. This is great news, but I am not sure why cancer was singled out.
Why do you think that any cause of death had to go up?
Overall US death rate went down from 8.5 to 8.0 between 1991 and 2011 (ie 6%). So every cause of death might have gone down (although I couldn't find the stats).
Re your edit: I'd not have guessed that this undefined category would be so large, it would be very interesting to see a breakdown of this category on a timeline. My guess is that some of the bigger ones in there could be far easier to solve than cancer.
"For those years, deaths from cancer also decreased by 1.8 percent among men and fell by 1.4 percent among women."
I hate to be this way, but as horrible as cancer is, the modes of death behind it are not to be ... advertised. My mother in law went to Alzheimers. Wouldn't wish that on anyone. As Hank Williams said, "I'll never get out of this world alive".
"Deaths" decreased but what about cases of cancer? Is it constant?
EDIT: Found this exert after going through the whole Cancer Institute pdf:
"
The overall rate of cancer cases (incidence) remained stable for women between 2007 and 2011, but declined by 1.8 percent per year for men.
Men experienced relatively rapid declines in cases of colon cancer (3.6 percent per year), lung cancer (3 percent per year) and prostate cancer (2.1 percent per year) during that period, the report found.
But there's been no change in incidence rates for breast cancer. And the report found that certain cancers are even on the rise. For example, thyroid cancer cases increased an average 4.5 percent per year between 2007 and 2011, and liver cancer cases have increased by more than 3 percent.
The increase in liver cancer cases is largely due to hepatitis C infection, mainly through intravenous drug use and sharing needles in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Jemal said.
The rise in thyroid cancer cases cannot be easily explained, Jemal said. Some suspect the condition may be now overdiagnosed due to the overuse of imaging scans and ultrasound, he said, but there's also been an increase in the size of cancerous lesions found.
"For thyroid, it's very difficult to explain what's occurring," he said"
It's very difficult to say if this is good news or not. Is it not possible that people are actually dying from other things that have actually increased since 1991 that occur before cancer? In other words, couldn't the other illnesses that occur before cancer explain this decrease if those have been increasing?
It's a fair point to raise. I answer that since lifespans have increased, there isn't anything that is killing people before cancer often enough to account for the drop in cancer deaths.
This is true, but it's also possible that the very treatment that supposedly decreases cancer deaths also decreases the "other illnesses" such that the distance between the cancer death and other illness death is constant. In this case, lifespans could increase and still result in other illnesses killing more than cancer in spite of increased life expectancies.
This is good news. Unless of course you are currently dying of cancer.
Treatment for the most common solid tumours remains woefully inadequate, unless you compare it to even more woeful older therapies. Lung cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, these all remain horrible diseases, that result in an untimely and unpleasant death. We are replacing mortality with expensive morbidity that approaches death asymptotically. This produces a better looking survival curve, but is it actually better?
Good news on the colon cancer, though. Exact Sciences released an effective screen for it recently, catching pre-cancer as well. It is a slow growth cancer that can be treated very well at early stages. My guess is that they will drop colon cancer way down the cancer mortality list.
I did by buying EXAS when the new CEO came in at about $2. The previous management didn't have what it took to get it off the ground. The availability to buy the test came out this quarter so sales numbers are not in yet (but it is fully reimbursed at ~$500, where management said they would make a killing at $300). So after doing your due diligence, it may be worth waiting for the sales numbers to come out and buy on any weakness.
The other way to take advantage is to get yourself screened :)
What you see as a disparity, researchers and pharmaceuticals see as a honeypot. A cure for any form is a win for someone, but make no mistake that solid tumors are on a few institutions' big targets.
There's a few different approaches going on right now including (1) studying mechanisms of how tumors become drug resistant, (2) stimulating the immune system to better target the tumors, and (3) figuring out how to make those solid tumors spongy again.
1. Read the article, or at least skim it before commenting. The rates listed are population normalized, it would be a very bizarre thing indeed if some other cause of death was preferentially killing people before they got old enough to die of cancer yet somehow still caused overall life expectancy to increase.
2. Acquaint yourself with some basic statistics on causes of death in recent times, such as this easy to read infographic from a few months ago: http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-d...
As you'll see, death rates for all age groups have been in decline across the board since 1991. People aren't dying due to obesity or diabetes instead of cancer, they're just dying less, mostly regardless of cause.
So please stop needlessly injecting your speculation and biases into the comments here, please only put forward arguments which are consistent with the well-established facts as we know them. Thanks.