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

Thankful

[American AC in Paris]

Without these advances, my wife would likely have died of this disease. Instead, she's alive, and despite the fact that breast cancer survivorship is no walk in the park, she's still able to do most of what she did before.

It's incredible how much medical science has advanced on breast cancer since the late 80's. I hope the research keeps its momentum.

Why is black-white disparity "unacceptable"?

[blindseer]

Still, the remaining black-white disparity âoeis not acceptable,â said Lee Schwartzberg, a medical oncologist at West Cancer Center in Germantown, Tenn. He said the gap reflects complicated social, economic and biological factors that are not yet fully understood, including insurance and employment status. In addition, black women are twice as likely as white women to develop so-called triple negative breast cancer, which can be harder to treat, the report noted.

They do a study and find that people with African ancestry tend to have a kind of cancer that we don't yet know how to treat. What if this disparity was found between people from Angola vs. Kenya? Would this be "unacceptable? What if it was between Greeks and French? Would that be "unacceptable"? They can call this "complicated" all they like but the reason that this one group tends to have higher rates of deaths from cancer is clear from the paragraph I quoted, it's genetic. There's nothing we can do about one's genes.

It seems obvious they know the reason why the disparity exists, it's genetic. However, when we equate this disparity to race instead of genetics then it becomes "unacceptable" to people. It's unfortunate that we cannot treat this "triple negative" cancer better. Research into treating this cancer should continue, as should treatments for all kinds of cancer. Seeing this as a matter of race instead of genetics turns a problem of medicine and science into a political issue.

Can we leave politics out of science? Please? Politics ruined football. If sanity is not regained then politics will ruin everything.