Cancer Rates Decline; Survival Up

[PfcHammer]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/02/health/printable620791.shtml

Cancer Rates Decline; Survival Up
WASHINGTON, June 2, 2004

(AP) Lung cancer is inching down among women after decades of smoking-fueled increases and overall survival rates are improving for most types of tumors among both men and women.

Not everyone is reaping the gains: Minorities are still more likely than whites to die from cancer, says the nation's annual report on cancer, to be published Thursday in the journal Cancer.

But largely, the news remains optimistic. Death rates from cancer in general have dropped 1.1 percent a year since 1993, and Thursday's report confirms that decline continued in 2001. Rates of new cases are declining about half a percent a year, too.

Most striking in this latest tally is what's happening with the No. 1 cancer killer: Rates of female lung cancer diagnoses have declined about 2 percent a year since 1998, years after men began a similar improvement. Also, female death rates from lung cancer have leveled off, remaining virtually unchanged since 1995, the report says.

[rexcat]

1. Of interest...

In children approx. 80% survive the cancer but in adults only 50% survive. There are a lot of factors with adult survival rates, including life style (smoking, environmental exposures, age, and the list goes on) but the biggest factor is early detection and the lower on the socioeconomic scale one is the later the diagnosis and the worse the prognosis.