Comment by iooi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iooi | Hacker News Reader

> Cancer deaths have fallen by a total of just 5 percent since 1950.

This is suuuuper misleading, to the point where I'm thinking that the author has an agenda.

Cancer deaths is the wrong metric to use, since population is always increasing and the proportion of people getting cancer is also changing over time.

You want to look at the cancer death rate instead, from 1991 to 2015 the cancer death rate decreased by 26%. It's also really important to take into account that mortality rates are _vastly_ different across different types of cancers and across genders -- in that same time period, the death rate for males with lung cancer decreased by 45%! [2]

Again, this article is misleading and probably has an agenda behind it. If you want to learn more about the history of cancer treatment, The Emperor of All Maladies is a great book.

[1] https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/understanding-cancer-deat... [2] https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/facts-and-figures-2018-ra...

Also, as progress is made on things like heart disease, people who might have died of that, eventually die of cancer instead.

Longer lifespans means more people dying of cancer. Something eventually gets you..."natural causes" isn't really a thing.

This is Reason, so of course there is an agenda - the government needs to take it's meddling hands out of our free markets and let us sell whatever drugs to whoever we want!

Scott Alexander (Slatestarcodex) had a post about this earlier this month:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-mo...

The gist of the post was that cancer rates since 1990 have gone down primarily because smoking has declined, not because cancer treatment has improved.

Which isn't related to cancer death rates, which is the proportion of people who die from cancer out of the population of people that have cancer.

If you assume really old people don't have higher death rates, I suppose.

Both the Slatestarcodex article and the links you provided in your comment use deaths per 100,000. In fact, your article reaches a similar conclusion to Scott Alexander, that mortality is declining mainly because of smoking declining.

It touches on that, too. It's also a hard metric to work with because we're getting better at _detecting_ cancers, including more benign and earlier stage ones. I believe the SSC post found that most of the improvement in cancer mortality was more an artifact of detection than actual improvements in care. i.e.: if you look _only_ at equivalent Stage 4 cancers, then the death rate from there hasn't changed much over time.

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