Unfortunately, my family has a history of cancer. Fortunately, the American Cancer Society recently published an article celebrating the regression of cancer! The American Cancer Society gladly celebrated a nearly 20% decline in the overall risk of dying from cancer. The article claimed the biggest progress was within middle-aged black males; who are statistically disadvantaged in terms of incidence and deaths from cancer.
Now, how can we believe such a broad statistic? How does one measure all of these cases? The American Cancer Society annually estimates the number of new cancer cases and deaths in the United States. Using the most recent data on cancer fatality,incidence, and survival, the American Cancer Society organizes this data. This year, they collected and recorded 1,665,540 new cancer cases. In 2014, they recorded 587,720 cancer deaths. In men, half of all these cases were comprised of lung, colon, and prostate cancer; in women, breast, lung, and colon were amongst the most popular forms of cancer (American Cancer Society). While these statistics appear depressing, relatively speaking, they are incredibly uplifting. In the last five years, incidence has dropped merely 0.6% in men, and has stayed the same for women. Deaths, however, have decreased by 1.8% in men (per year), and 1.4% in women! In conclusion, cancer is just as abundant, but statistically less deadly.
It’s important to keep in mind when reading these statistics that there are large sample populations. While 1.4% may seem negligible to a college student, it is an incredibly large group of people. For example, cancer killed 215.1 people per 100,000 people in 1991; whereas cancer killed 171.8 people per 100,000 in 2010 (American Cancer Society). If you do the math, this subtle decreased has avoided 1,340,400 cancer deaths in the last five years. While the progress seems encouraging, scientists are not satisfied yet; John. R. Seffrin, chief executive officer at American Cancer society writes: “The progress we are seeing is good, even remarkable, but we can and must do even better”(American Cancer Society). The attitude reflects the utmost perservernece and determination, and I am thankful to live in such a determined and intelligent society. Curious about cancer diagnoses based on location, I decided to view a geographic map of cancer diagnoses. I wanted to find a correlation between size, or weather, and cases, but failed to do so. I am from New York, where cancer.org estimated 107,840 cases for 2015 (cancer.org). In Pennsylvania, there were an estimated 81,540 cases for 2015 (cancer.org). Strangely enough, in California there were 172,090 predicted cases for 2015, while New Mexico only predicted 9,970 cases(cancer.org). Between all of the variables, I was left without a final conclusion on environment, location, and susceptibility.
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@editorial/documents/document/acspc-044552.pdf (if eligible on screen)
What we do know is that there is historically-encouraging progress. Survival rates have increased from 49% between 1975-1977 to 68% from 2004-2010(cancer.org). The second set of data (2004-2010) is six years, which is three times the length of the first set of data (1975-1977); clearly, survival rates are substantially increasing.
sources:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140107102634.htm
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@editorial/documents/document/acspc-044552.pdf