There is remarkable news about improved life expectancy in this country, and a decline in the death rate from cancer is a major factor. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Americans are now living 78.7 years on average. Deaths from cancer were down a little more than 2% between 2017 and 2018.
Encouragingly, the new figures represent a reversal from the past three years, which saw a decline in life-expectancy since 2014’s peak of 78.9 years. “This news is a real victory,” said the Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar in a statement.
2.9 Million Fewer Cancer Deaths
Read MoreWhole New Classes of Drugs
The pace of approval for new cancer treatments has reached a new record. In 2018 alone, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 19 completely new cancer drugs and drug combinations, and approved 25 new uses for already approved cancer drugs (for example, the promising immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, or Keytruda, which was already approved to treat melanoma, advanced non-small cell lung cancer, and several other cancers, was approved to treat six more specific cancer types in 2018, including a certain type of cervical cancer and B-cell lymphoma).Every one of these new drugs plays into the rising number of cancer survivors, but perhaps the most influential of all are those in the immunotherapy category.
The Immunotherapy Revolution
"Immunotherapies for lung cancer, which won the Nobel Prize in 2018, are actually preventing people from dying," Dr. Otis Brawley, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, tells SurvivorNet. Brawley previously served as Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for the American Cancer Society. "It is rare that in cancer epidemiology, that you can point to one treatment, and say that overall death rate from all cancers is going down because this one treatment became available. In this case, we can do that."
“We Know It Works”
Dr. Jim Allison, Chair of the Department of Immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center, talked about the effectiveness of combining immunotherapy as a complementary treatment to traditional “targeted” therapies like chemotherapy and radiation for many types of cancer. Simply put, he says: “We now know it works… and so it’s something out there that can offer patients a bit of hope." For decades, Dr. Allison has researched ways to harness the immune system to fight cancer. As the Nobel Committee said of Dr. Allison’s work, he has, “…established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.”
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That principle, Dr. Allison explains, is about allowing the body’s T-cells (an important part of the body’s natural immune system) to fight the cancerous tumors. “The one that I developed is called Checkpoint Therapy because…we identified these brakes on the immune system and figured out how to use those to keep T-cells that are in your body going and generate big numbers…of T-cells that’ll kill cancer cells.”
This is just the beginning, says Dr. Allison. As researchers combine immunotherapy drugs with different targeted agents, the possibilities are only going to expand. "Immunotherapy is rather unique in that for the first time, we’re getting truly curative therapies in many kinds of disease. And not just in melanoma but in lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Merkel cell cancer, head and neck cancer. It goes on and on."
Dr. Steven Rosenberg, Chief Surgery Branch, Senior Investigator, National Cancer Institute, says the NCI’s referral service helps patients gain access to innovative new treatments.
22 Million Survivors: A Record Number of People Living After Cancer
The most positive news is the increase in people who are surviving after their cancer diagnoses. By 2030, a new report predicts that there will be 22.1 million cancer survivors living in the U.S.a good five million more than in January of this year. The report, called "Cancer Treatment and Survivorship Statistics," is published every three years by the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute (NCI). According to the report, the term "cancer survivor" refers to any person who has a history of cancer from the point of diagnosis through the rest of their life.
What’s encouraging is that the predicted rise in cancer survivors is the opposite trend of what we're seeing for cancer incidence ratesthat is, the number of people that get cancerwhich is declining for men and staying stable for women. This is good news. Fewer or the same number of people are getting cancer to begin with, and more people who do get cancer are surviving it.
The report also broke down these numbers, and found that two-thirds of cancer survivors are over the age of 65, while only one in 10 is under 50. It’s predicted that for men, the highest number of cancer survivors by 2030 will be those previously diagnosed with:
- Prostate cancer (5,017,810 survivors)
- Colon & rectum cancer (994,210 survivors)
- Melanoma (936,980 survivors)
- Urinary/ bladder cancer (832,910 survivors)
- Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (535,870 survivors)
And for women:
- Breast cancer (4,957,960 survivors)
- Uterine cancer (1,023,290 survivors)
- Thyroid cancer (989,340 survivors)
- Colon & rectum cancer (965,590 survivors)
- Melanoma (888,740 survivors)
Earlier Detection
Advances in screening technologies (think 3D mammograms) and more accurate blood tests have contributed to the rising survivor numbers, too. People are finding their cancers at earlier stagesbefore the malignant cells have had a chance to spread throughout the bodymaking them more likely to beat their cancers and live to join the ranks of survivors. Education and awareness have gone a long way, too, as people have increasingly tuned in to signs and symptoms of cancer, and have proactively visited their doctors for routine screenings. While the rapid increase in cancer survivors projected in the report reflects our aging population, it’s also due to the exciting advances in treatment outlined about– and to early detection.
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