The problem is this is mostly due to screening, not progress at treating advanced cancer, although that has improved too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rituximab
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6398399/
Flashier, and something I've already talked about, is CAR T-cell therapy, the first generations of which were approved in 2017. This therapy has definite risks of severe side-effects, but it can result in complete remission of cancers that have survived multiple lines of chemotherapy, as happened with me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell
Immunotherapy isn't just promising, it's here, and, because of it, so am I, but even more exciting is that it gives us more avenues of research to build off of known-useful therapies.
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.
It's not that new in cancer therapy, with R-CHOP (the CHOP protocol plus Rituxan) apparently being introduced in the early 2000s:
No, because the death rate is measured at the population level, not at the incidence level. Fewer people are dying today of cancer than 30 years ago.
The only way that detection bias could impact that outcome is if you make the argument that a large number of terminal cancer cases were going undetected in 1991 at the time of death.
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.
No disagreement with you there. By "perfect screening" I assumed a "perfect" patient set where problems brought up at annual checkups lead directly to tests which lead to detection, but perhaps that's a naïve assumption to the point of uselessness.
Still, I think it's easy to write off screening advances as skewing the data set vs. actually saving lives, when they do in fact help people that otherwise could have been much sicker.
i mean maybe not in the usa but in sane places
A person can't die twice, so if heart disease gets them first, then they won't die of cancer.
You could hardly have picked a worse counterexample. Deaths from heart disease have fallen dramatically over that time period, even faster than cancer deaths have dropped.
Deaths from strokes - which at one point equalled deaths from all cancers combined - have fallen as well, although much of that drop occurred before the time period in question.
Deaths from diabetes are actually quite few in number compared to heart disease and cancer. They've sort of plateaued over this time interval, which isn't good news, but hardly the alternate explanation for the reduction in cancer deaths.
Now, there is one big cause of death which we haven't addressed: COVID-19, which causes about 3x the number of deaths as diabetes, and over half the number of deaths as all cancers combined. But that only began in 2020, and this data shows a decrease across the entire interval, so it's not relevant here.
So, the cause of death won’t be “diabetes”, it’ll be heart attack, stroke, chronic infection, something like that.
Similar to AIDS in that it doesn’t kill you directly (not that we know that juvenile diabetes is a thing, and we routinely test for it), it just makes any other health challenge much dicier.
It's not like the CDC doesn't know this. They understand how diabetes works; that's reflected in the tabulation of data. It's still incorrect to say that the drop in cancer deaths is explainable by the increase in diabetes deaths, not the least because age-adjusted diabetes deaths decreased during most of that interval.
@15:40 early detection is the way to eliminate cancer: https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8 https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s
The reason people die from pancreatic cancer when they get it is because we can’t detect it early.
The article provides no numbers about cancer rate dropping. Yet the false association between the two ideas is so strong that even the authors themselves seem to theorize that the cancer rate itself is dropping because people don't smoke as often now.
Conflating those two concepts seems like a Very Bad Idea
The rate of people getting cancer in the US is a different question, but presumably it’s been increasing due to the aging population independent of other causes. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241494/median-age-of-the...
Yes. I expected to find that the decline in smoking has also lead to the decline in fatal cancer — and there it is. Still a good thing.
It's different for e.g. Flu, where more testing = more detection of an illness that would not necessarily have become serious, had it gone undetected.
What if they detect a slow growing cancer that wouldn't have become a problem before you hit the age of 150? Not every cancer is aggressively trying to eat its host whole.
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.