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.

Comments

Re:They don't save any live ...

[Ol Olsoc]

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.