U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
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Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#2Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#3The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#4The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
I get what you're saying: it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison since better screening means we're comparing cancers of different severities. I don't necessarily see that as a problem, though, since a lot of these earlier screened cancers would have become more advanced cancers down the line. If our testing were perfect such that we could detect all cancers early enough to stop, that would functionally be a cure, no?
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#5More vaccines seems like one of the most straightforward future mitigations since viruses like Hepatitis/HPV/mono/HIV/herpes/etc cause almost a fifth of cancer cases:
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#6fuck cancer
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#7The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
Screening, the HPV vaccine and dropping rates of smoking.
It would be nice if we could stop advanced cancers but at least we're getting better at prevention.
I lost my dad to cancer last year. It's a horrible disease. I really had no idea how horrific it is. My dad had a year longer than his initial prognosis thanks to new immunotherapy drugs.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#8The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
I get what you're saying: it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison since better screening means we're comparing cancers of different severities. I don't necessarily see that as a problem, though, since a lot of these earlier screened cancers would have become more advanced cancers down the line. If our testing were perfect such that we could detect all cancers early enough to stop, that would functionally be a c…
The thing we don't know is which early cancers actually progress to advanced cancer. It's possible that we detect more things that look like cancer, but that would not have ever progressed into full blown metastatic cancer (at least, not before the patient died of something else). So that could artificially make it look like we've gotten better at treating cancer, when actually we've just gotten better at detecting non-life-threatening cancer.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#9The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
I get what you're saying: it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison since better screening means we're comparing cancers of different severities. I don't necessarily see that as a problem, though, since a lot of these earlier screened cancers would have become more advanced cancers down the line. If our testing were perfect such that we could detect all cancers early enough to stop, that would functionally be a c…
> If our testing were perfect such that we could detect all cancers early enough to stop, that would functionally be a cure, no?
no. being able to detect cancer doesn't mean people are getting tested twice a year for their whole life. for example, you wouldn't have routine cancer screenings for children, but sometimes they get cancer, and on those occasions it'd be nice to have better treatment options.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#10The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
Why is this a problem? The point of screening is to find and treat the most common forms cancer before they become advanced.