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Medicine United States

US Cancer Death Rate Falls 33% Since 1991, Report Says (cnn.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the great-progress dept.
The rate of people dying from cancer in the United States has continuously declined over the past three decades, according to a new report from the American Cancer Society. CNN reports: The US cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991, which corresponds to an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted, according to the report, published Thursday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The rate of lives lost to cancer continued to shrink in the most recent year for which data is available, between 2019 and 2020, by 1.5%. The 33% decline in cancer mortality is "truly formidable," said Karen Knudsen, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society. The report attributes this steady progress to improvements in cancer treatment, drops in smoking and increases in early detection.

In their report, researchers from the American Cancer Society also pointed to HPV vaccinations as connected to reductions in cancer deaths. HPV, or human papillomavirus, infections can cause cervical cancer and other cancer types, and vaccination has been linked with a decrease in new cervical cancer cases. Among women in their early 20s, there was a 65% drop in cervical cancer rates from 2012 through 2019, "which totally follows the time when HPV vaccines were put into use," said Dr. William Dahut, the society's chief scientific officer. "There are other cancers that are HPV-related -- whether that's head and neck cancers or anal cancers -- so there's optimism this will have importance beyond this," he said. The lifetime probability of being diagnosed with any invasive cancer is estimated to be 40.9% for men and 39.1% for women in the US, according to the new report.

The new report includes data from national programs and registries, including those at the National Cancer Institute, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. Data showed that the US cancer death rate rose during most of the 20th century, largely due to an increase in lung cancer deaths related to smoking. Then, as smoking rates fell and improvements in early detection and treatments for some cancers increased, there was a decline in the cancer death rate from its peak in 1991. Since then, the pace of the decline has slowly accelerated. The new report found that the five-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has increased from 49% for diagnoses in the mid-1970s to 68% for diagnoses during 2012-18. The cancer types that now have the highest survival rates are thyroid at 98%, prostate at 97%, testis at 95% and melanoma at 94%, according to the report. Current survival rates are lowest for cancers of the pancreas, at 12%. The report does have some bad news: new cases of breast, uterine and prostate cancer have been "of concern" and rising in the United States.
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US Cancer Death Rate Falls 33% Since 1991, Report Says More

US Cancer Death Rate Falls 33% Since 1991, Report Says

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  • It'll go back up (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday January 12, 2023 @10:37PM (#63204620)

    HPV vaccinations as connected to reductions in cancer deaths

    Yeah but the HPV vaccine gave my daughter autism!

    Count on the anti-vaxxer to reverse that trend in years to come...

    • It'll be very hard to make that claim because autism is diagnosed much earlier. Otherwise, sure.

      What can befall young people in the vaccine age range?

      "My daughter became pregnant after she took the vaccine!"
      "My son began drinking once he took the shot"
      Etc.

  • Cancer death rates have fallen by 33% since 1991 and heart death rates have fallen by 50% since 1950 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/184515/deaths-by-heart-diseases-in-the-us-since-1950/). The overall death rate is still 1 per person. What are people dying from?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Arethan ( 223197 )

      People die of the same old shit, just now redistributed into different buckets. If heart disease and cancer deaths go down, then other sources (pulmonary related, blood diseases, accidents, etc) will go up. The best part about fear mongering within the medical space is that every tech advancement that reduces one death cause will inevitably cause an increase in one of the others. As you already said, there is still always just 1 death per person.

      This is FUD

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fazig ( 2909523 )
        I'd like to think that it's sarcasm. Because read the last two sentences very carefully:

        The overall death rate is still 1 per person. What are people dying from?

        That's just a rephrasing of the fact that everyone dies eventually. I don't see any FUD there.
        But of course using sarcasm on the internet is a double edged blade. There appear to be plenty of people who do genuinely not comprehend the statement, regardless of how often they read and think about it and would assume that there must be a genuine con

      • Obviously there's one death per person but, in spite of what you imply, the scientists and doctors are not all idiots. There's a difference between deaths (one per person) and death *rates* (numbers of death per unit time, usually one year but sometimes - as in cancer survival rates - five years or something else). Death *rates* are a proxy for longevity.

        In other words, people are living longer. That's not FUD.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Cancer death rates have fallen by 33% since 1991 and heart death rates have fallen by 50% since 1950 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/184515/deaths-by-heart-diseases-in-the-us-since-1950/). The overall death rate is still 1 per person. What are people dying from?

      Strokes, old age, influenza, COVID-19, car accidents, broken hips, aneurysms, emphysema/COPD/*, etc.

    • Yeah, given enough time the probability of death eventually reaches 1. The important part is #1 how much time, i.e. how long we live, & #2 how well we are during that time, i.e. (medical) quality of life. However, the two tend to correlate. If we can reduce the causes of premature deaths with healthier lifestyles & better medical interventions, that's great.
    • live long enough and you still die of cancer or heart failure, but if you had 3 chances to die (presumably with different people) and one of them didn't happen the rate drops 33%. Then your life expectancy goes up.

      Covid kinda screwed that though, and our life expectancy went down. Longer and longer work hours aren't helping either. We're working more than the Japanese. And unlike Salary men who might sit around alot and drink tea, Americans tend to actually work, even if it's pointless busy work.

  • This is great news, but I'd be more interested in what's happened to the cancer rate itself, as I suspect it's gone up. Sure, some of any increase there might be would be the result of better detection; but most of it would probably stem from lifestyle and environmental factors over which we have some control, or perhaps even a lot of control.

    I did a quick search to see if I could confirm my impression that the cancer rate has risen, but couldn't find anything readily available. Accessing the CDC's Public U [cdc.gov]

  • Powerful rational explanation (Score:4, Informative)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday January 13, 2023 @03:27AM (#63205026)

    1. First, smoking has decreased .. that alone can account for most of the lives saved when you consider that smoking is the cause of about 30% of cancer deaths Reference: https://www.cancer.org/healthy... [cancer.org] As in, if we can get everyone to quit smoking. That will eliminate 30% of cancer deaths.
    2. Cancer is diagnosed earlier and better. The fact is that everyone gets some cancer during their lifetime, but often the immune system, with no help, can destroy it before it gets to be in stage 3 or 4 (when everything is fucked). Since we are diagnosing cancer earlier, we are catching some cases where, in prior decades, a patient may have survived cancer without ever knowing it because it would have gone into remission by itself (because the immune system woke up). Because of that, it looks like we have an increase in cancer rates while being able to "cure" more of them. Diagnose more, cure more. Early diagnosis helps to cure because cancer is vulnerable when caught early, but incidentally, early diagnosis also amplifies the "cure rate" to make itself look good.
    Reference: https://www.statnews.com/2019/... [statnews.com]
    "Physicians felt compelled to evaluate small spots on the kidney and thyroid that they had stumbled upon while imaging for some other purpose simply because these abnormalities might be cancer. Skin moles became a source of concern and an opportunity for biopsy. The incidence of kidney cancer doubled, thyroid cancer tripled, and melanoma went up sixfold — while their death rates remained stable."

  • At least not before I know what they die of now. Because one thing's certain: People still die. That's non-negotiable, at least until we found a cure for life. Life always has a terminal prognosis.

    Cancer is usually something that happens to you rather late in life, barring a few special forms of cancer that kill young people and even kids. Most forms of cancer are something that hits you late, when your body had time to accumulate the various cancer-inducing toxins that our industries like to dump on us and

  • Cancer death rate is generally determined based on 5 year survival since diagnosis. It's good to keep in mind that a lot of that increased 5 year survival is going to be people whose cancer would not have necessarily killed them within those 5 years if they got it in 1990. For instance if you have some testicular cancer that would have been undetected and would not have killed you in 1990, now perhaps it gets detected and you get added to the 'five year surival' increase.

    Another situation that is possible h

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Some of it too is how we record things for sure, when you eventually get killed by the things you did to treat the cancer. IE you do bunch of chemo therapy and end up dying a decade later from renal failure that probably would not happened if you had not been on all the cancer drugs.

      So did the cancer kill you or did you just die of chronic kidney disease?

  • But lots of people kill themselves when they get a cancer diagnose, so to not ruin their family just to live a few extra months in pain.

  • US Cancer Death Rate Falls 33% Since 1991

    I'll drink to that!

  • Cancer is mainly a disease of old age. If the cancer death rate is going down, that can happen, and probably is, because people are dying at an age where they haven't had a chance to develop cancer yet.

  • I can only say: hooray for modern medicine... ...and the fantastic, caring, dedicated people who work in healthcare!
    I met many of them, and have to say (as a technical person) it's like they are a different species from us.
    Thank all of you!

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