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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
#62This is great progress. Important to note this is not an average effect across all cancers. Some cancers still have terrible outcomes eg pancreatic cancer, GBM, small cell lung cancer, stomach and esophageal cancer, certain types of breast cancer. Advanced colorectal cancer also not great. The other aspect of this is that death can often be replaced with multiple years of a highly medicalised and sallow existence whi…
Prostate cancer is one that men should be especially familiar with. My dad was diagnosed years ago after his PCP ignored escalating PSA levels. Although he's a "survivor" of Stage 4 his life is a shell of what it was, and has expressed a number of times he wishes he was dead. When I spoke to the oncologist after his diagnosis I remember this adage specifically: "If you did an autopsy on every man that dies over 40, y…
> Be your own advocate and research the things your doctor tells you
I share your concern but I think there is no definitive advise about how to prevent these horrible outcomes (besides the usual "do regular exercise", "lower sugar consumption", "avoid stress", etc.) Did you find anything more concrete?
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prostate cancer is one that men should be especially familiar with. My dad was diagnosed years ago after his PCP ignored escalating PSA levels. Although he's a "survivor" of Stage 4 his life is a shell of what it was, and has expressed a number of times he wishes he was dead. When I spoke to the oncologist after his diagnosis I remember this adage specifically: "If you did an autopsy on every man that dies over 40, y…
Knowing something must be checked, while your primary refuses to check it, what is one's recourse in the US?
Typically, for HMOs, it's getting your doctor to recommend a specialist.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#64[dead]
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prostate cancer is one that men should be especially familiar with. My dad was diagnosed years ago after his PCP ignored escalating PSA levels. Although he's a "survivor" of Stage 4 his life is a shell of what it was, and has expressed a number of times he wishes he was dead. When I spoke to the oncologist after his diagnosis I remember this adage specifically: "If you did an autopsy on every man that dies over 40, y…
> Be your own advocate and research the things your doctor tells you I share your concern but I think there is no definitive advise about how to prevent these horrible outcomes (besides the usual "do regular exercise", "lower sugar consumption", "avoid stress", etc.) Did you find anything more concrete?
Generally it's about catching issues early as possible not necessarily preventing the issue from occurring. If you wait until you're experiencing impacting systems before getting things like this checked your likelihood of having the same quantity of quality adjusted years of life is much lower.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
if cancer screenings for children were painless, lower risk than the cancer, and cost five dollars, you would totally have routine cancer screenings for children i mean maybe not in the usa but in sane places
They would have them in the US as well, but only for people in the Gold tier of insurance
And only children of parents who were members of whichever political party had decided the scans aren't an evil hoax.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#67Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#68This is great progress. Important to note this is not an average effect across all cancers. Some cancers still have terrible outcomes eg pancreatic cancer, GBM, small cell lung cancer, stomach and esophageal cancer, certain types of breast cancer. Advanced colorectal cancer also not great. The other aspect of this is that death can often be replaced with multiple years of a highly medicalised and sallow existence whi…
Prostate cancer is one that men should be especially familiar with. My dad was diagnosed years ago after his PCP ignored escalating PSA levels. Although he's a "survivor" of Stage 4 his life is a shell of what it was, and has expressed a number of times he wishes he was dead. When I spoke to the oncologist after his diagnosis I remember this adage specifically: "If you did an autopsy on every man that dies over 40, y…
You're misinterpreting the "when not if" adage. For prostate cancer it's generally used as an example of how there are cancers you die of and cancers you die with. Many prostate cancers are so nonaggressive that men will die with them and never know they were there.
And that's the problem. If you did a test and saw something & then immediately eradicated that prostate cancer, what if it was going to be one of the ones that wouldn't have caused you real harm during your natural life? In that case the likelihood of the treatment causing more damage to you than the cancer itself is high. And predicting which are which is improving but still imperfect.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#69The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
There have been some wonderful advances in cancer therapy, such as immunotherapy. For example, Rituxan (rituximab) only dates to 1997, but it's already in a number of chemotherapy protocols, leading to a clear improvement in survival rates in previously difficult-to-treat cancers such as aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rituximab https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6398399/ Fl…
> For example, Rituxan (rituximab) only dates to 1997
It is kind of scary to me that drugs these days have such long regulatory lead times that a drug developed in 1997 is just now being entered into treatment regimens.
I understand why that is (the Thalidomide tragedy stuff and like that), but I also clearly remember reading an article ~10 years back that asked why cancer treatment seemingly hadn’t made any leapfrogs since the ~70s, and the answer was back then they could aggressively iterate on treatments.
Re: U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by a third since 1991
#70Now remove lung cancer and see if the numbers have changed that much.
Out of curiosity, I chose one cancer from the article: breast cancer. Deaths declined from a peak of 33 to 19.1 per 100k women, whereas smoking only seems to increase your risk modestly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5698948/
> The HR (reference group was never smokers) was 1.14 (95% CI 1.03–1.25; P = 0.010) for ever smokers, 1.24 (95% CI 1.08–1.43; P = 0.002) for starting smoking at ages However smoking rates have gone down massively since the '50s:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/237908/smoking-rate-hits-new-lo...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-the-prevalence...
Also something that absolutely does seem to raise your risk of breast cancer is chest x-rays:
https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
> Ever/never chest X-ray exposure increases BC risk 2-fold regardless of age at first exposure and, by up to 5-fold when carrying 3 or more rare variants in a DNA repair gene.
Digital x-rays have largely replaced film, and they can reduce radiation exposure by 80-90%.
So I'm not sure one way or the other.