But aging population and increasing obesity threaten progress
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Tara Haelle
HealthDay Reporter
TUESDAY, Sept. 16, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- About 14.5 million U.S. cancer survivors are alive today, compared to just 3 million in 1971, the American Association for Cancer Research reported Tuesday.
These individuals amount to 4 percent of the population and include nearly 380,000 survivors of childhood cancer, according to the association's annual progress report. The paper outlines advances in prevention, identification, research and treatment of cancer and details some of the challenges ahead.
But these numbers can be somewhat misleading unless they take into account advances in identifying cancers earlier, said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
Survival rates refer to how long a person lives with cancer (including in remission) while mortality rates refer to the death rate, but survival will be longer if the cancer is found earlier, even if the person dies at the same time they would have.
"People don't want to live longer with cancer," Brawley said. "They want to not die with cancer." But he said mortality rates have also seen big drops, including an overall decline of 22 percent in cancer deaths from 1991 to 2011.
"Prevention has been the biggest contributor, with smoking cessation as a bigger overall driver of the decline in mortality" than scientific treatment advances, Brawley said. "People who stopped smoking in the 1960s and 1970s did not die in the 1990s and beyond, and that's why it took until 1991 for mortality to start going down big-time."
Yet two looming issues may have a significant impact on increasing cancer rates in the future, the report noted.
One is the currently aging population. Most cancers occur in people aged 65 and older, and the number of Americans in this age group is expected to double by the year 2060, the report said.
That portends an increase in cancer diagnoses from 1.6 million in the United States in 2014 to an estimated 2.4 million in 2035, the report stated.
The other issue relates to widespread obesity. The report notes that one-third of all newly diagnosed cancers in the United States are related to being overweight or obese. These include esophageal, colorectal, endometrial, gallbladder, kidney, pancreatic and postmenopausal breast cancers.
"One of the great threats in terms of cancer in the U.S. is the increasing obesity rates," Brawley said. "We think it's the high levels of insulin that obese people have in their blood because insulin spurs on tumor development."
As smoking rates continue declining, "the leading cause of cancer in the U.S. may very well be obesity rather than tobacco use soon," Brawley said.
Another challenge related to cancer prevention, detection and treatment in the United States are health care access disparities for racial and ethnic minorities and poorer people.
source : Targeted Drugs Among Successes Against Cancer, Says New Report
