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Breast-Cancer Death Rate Drops Almost 40 Percent, Saving 322,000 Lives, Study Says (washingtonpost.com)
Breast cancer death rates declined almost 40 percent between 1989 and 2015, averting 322,600 deaths, the American Cancer Society reported Tuesday. From a report: Breast cancer death rates increased by 0.4 percent per year from 1975 to 1989, according to the study. After that, mortality rates decreased rapidly, for a 39 percent drop overall through 2015. The report, the latest to document a long-term reduction in breast-cancer mortality, attributed the declines to both improvements in treatments and to early detection by mammography. Deanna Attai, a breast cancer surgeon at the University of California at Los Angeles who was not involved in the study, said the advances in treatment included much better chemotherapy regimens -- developed in the 1980s and refined ever since -- that are administered post-surgery to reduce the risk of recurrence. Other improvements have included tamoxifen, an anti-estrogen agent that was approved in the late 1970s; Herceptin, a drug used to treat tumors with a higher-than-normal level of a protein called HER2 and drugs called aromatase inhibitors.
Ok, now that we have success with breast cancer, how about time and funds for prostate cancer....you know, to keep things even.
If you had to prioritize, you would in all cases go for breast cancer first. Except for the much fewer cases of aggressive prostate cancers, you have something that kills more people.
Many men die of old age while having prostate cancer.
The more important issue of treating prostate cancer is the number of false positives, which lead to unneeded operations, and often some pretty nasty outcomes. A husband of one of my wife's friends was diagnosed, and the doctor and the wife demanded a really aggressive approach. Today, he is impotent and wears adult diapers because he has no bladder control. He said death wasn't a bad alternative to that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And as a counter-point to this: My wife died two years ago from breast cancer that eventually came back and spread to her brain. She was originally diagnosed at 34 and died at 39. It came back just about three years after her initial diagnosis and double mastectomy. It came back in her lungs initially and we did everything we could, including medical trials for new drugs, and monthly trips to M.D. Anderson.
The moral of this story is that the new medical advances testing such as mammograms don't do any good when doctors start applying them at an arbitrary age. In my late wife's case the standard age of "start getting tested at 40" was six years too late. We had several doctors at M.D. Anderson tell us that they felt mammogram testing should start much earlier.
Don't wait until 40.