Your Chance of Dying from Cancer is Lower Today Than It’s Been in 25 Years

According to a paper published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, the American Cancer Society studies the incidence rate of cancer (the number of cancer diagnoses that occur) as well as the death rate from cancer each year and have found the numbers to be heading in a positive direction of late. Beyond the 27% in the number of cancer deaths overall, there was also a 2% decline in incidences of cancer in men between 2006 and 2015 (the incidence rate in women stayed stable).

Similarly, while the incidence of cancer in children and teens has actually increased slightlyby about 0.7% each year since 1975the death rate in this population has declined significantly. While in 1970, 6.5 children or teens out of every 100,000 died from cancer, only 2.3 out of 100,000 did in 2016. This paper credits this, in large part, to a significant decline in deaths from childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia, thanks to improved chemotherapy treatments and other new therapies.

The study also reports, though, that while the racial gap in the death rate is narrowing, the socioeconomic disparity in terms of the risk of dying from cancer has grown since 1991. In other words, the wealthy are, increasingly, less likely to die from cancer than the poorer members of our society.

The authors of the paper surmise that this is due largely to certain lower-income populations having higher incidences of preventable cancers, and suggest that this areas make for “low‐hanging fruit for locally focused cancer control efforts, including increased access to basic health care and interventions for smoking cessation, healthy living, and cancer screening programs.”

What does this mean? Prevention efforts and access to affordable and effective treatment for preventable and treatable cancers should be available to people living in all parts of the country, not just the wealthy ones.

As an overall picture, treatment of cancers has seen exciting advancements in recent years, such as immunotherapy. “In the last several years, there’s been an explosion of information that enables us to help larger numbers of patients by getting their body’s own immune system to fight this disease,” Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute told SurvivorNet in a previous interview. “There have been some startling advances even in the last few years that have been the result of the genomic revolution, our ability to detect and sequenced the human genome.” Immunotherapy is most often used alongside targeted treatments like chemotherapy and/or radiation. This has been shown to be effective for a wide variety of cancers, including breast, colon, prostate, melanoma, and more.

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