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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.
If I read that correctly, this means that of all the cases reported now, the overall odds of death have dropped 40% compared to all the cases reported thirty years ago or so. That doesn't mean the odds of survival for a given diagnosis have improved 40%. One reason cited was the increased early detection through mammograms, so clearly some of the improvement is from shifting the average diagnosis to a less severe tumor. This raises the issue of tumors that are now detected which in the 70s would have gone unnoticed, and wouldn't have progressed, but are now detected and removed. (I'm not an expert, but I read on the Internet that this is an issue, so it must be true.) If you take that into account, it may pull down the overall percentage a tick.
In any case, it's clearly good news, but I've still lost a friend from breast cancer, but I'm hopeful that another will survive. I'm looking forward to what the next decade or two bring with better understanding of the genetic differences of specific cancers and vaccines or other drugs designed to target those differences.
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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
In Medicine, a success is having the patient die from a condition that you didn't try to treat,
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Over the past 30 years, my wife has survived breast cancer 3 times. All three occurrences were classified as new primaries. The third time was HER2 positive, which meant chemo for a year. The first six rounds were classic chemo plus Herceptin, followed by another 8 rounds of Herceptin only. She has also been on tamoxifen for the last 5 years. The first two occurrences were early enough that the HER2 factor wasn't even discovered. Thankfully, it seems that neither of the first two were HER2 positive anyway, as both were not as aggressive as the third. The key in all three cases was early detection. I noticed a comment above about delaying fate. In a way this is true, in that she will be able in the future to die of something other than breast cancer. In the mean time, we get to enjoy retirement together. Modern medicine has kept us both alive, as I am around thanks to a triple bypass.
The reality? We've hardly advanced at all with treating or curing cancer; we've just started looking for it earlier.
It's probably even worse than that. Cancer death rate is the number of cancer deaths divided by the number of diagnosed cancers. But it's a well known fact that a large number of diagnosed cancers are false positives or are at least benign enough to be unlikely to actually become the cause of death. People can live with such a "cancer" for decades and end up dying from something else. This means that increased screening automatically increases the denominator of the cancer rate and therefore reduces the rate even if the number of deaths remains the same.
That doesn't mean we haven't made any progress at all, of course. I sure hope we've decreased the nominator as well. But it does make the 40 percent figure rather less impressive. I'm actually quite surprised that we haven't done better with all these cancer "breakthroughs" we keep hearing about in the media.
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I don't know where you got your definition of the cancer death rate, but it is not what they used. They looked at how many deaths from breast cancer there were per 100,000 women (NOT per 100,000 women with breast cancer). That number is 40% lower than it was. I don't know how you can spin that as 'unimpressive'. It doesn't matter if the decrease is because of better treatment, or early detection, or simply not getting breast cancer in the first place (which of course would be the ideal).