Spoilers: the per capita lung cancer incidence is going down for all of the 21st century. It is actually improving faster the most recent decade than the previous. What has changed is the total number of new lung cancer cases is slightly increasing.
This is easily explained by an increasingly elderly population, which makes up over 80% of lung cancer sufferers: https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-looku...
2006, 1.5 million new cancer cases.
2017, 1.7 million new cancer cases.
The data certainly exists. I wasn't inferring that it doesn't exist.
Obviously this is all cancers and us centric. Obviously there's some hiding of facts here as well. Not apples to apples comparison to the subject at hand.
Please also don't take me as arguing for the return of tobacco or encouraging tobacco use at all.
The point I am making... we now know what causes cancer and it's beyond controversial. To the point that public health would rather people have cancer. Let that sink in.
Your premise could easily be explained by "the percentage of the American population over 60 has increased steadily."
See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-...
So yea, more total cancers diagnosed, cause old people get cancer.
Here's the followup.
If we have a cure for cancer. We have some workable options for anti-dementia. I don't believe in mrna technology but we probably have effective anti-viral treatments very soon. We also might have anti-aging drugs like metformin and others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX9P1xuIJGg
What's about to happen to the world population? Life expectancy is probably going to increase dramatically. Countries like China, Russia, Balkans, Japan who have serious population decline problems MUST go down these paths. Keep people alive as much as possible. Zerocovid is about minimizing population decline.
Then also what happens to retirement? You get a country like India where 60% of people don't work. Can the 40% of the population really work to keep the 60% of people sitting at home?
Retirement is a pyramid scheme. More people have to pay into it then receive. If people are about to live to 150 years old. Is retirement still 65?
That it exists, that it is effective, that the pros outweigh the cons?
It depends on where you live. There are countries with capitalization systems instead of repartition systems. The most common one in the future will probably be a mix?
> It's also not a paradox for why many lifetime smokers never get cancer while non-smokers are now more commonly the ones with lung cancer.
This is simply wrong.
Your insults toward me win. I have been flagged on my post and unable to post on HN. If I can reply again I will.
>This is simply wrong.
I'm here for conversation. I'm nobody from nobodyville; dont have cancer and never smoked. If you have points to make like others are doing, then hell ya. Telling me I'm wrong without explaining how im dumb doesn't really help me be less dumb.
So quick breakdown. In the 1990s when we had peak lung cancer. It was something like 3% of lung cancer folks were non-smokers. 97% is quite significant to say smoking = lung cancer.
In 2006-2010 it rose to about 20% were non-smokers or at least didn't admit to smoking or having an occupational reason. General thought was just exposure in history and forgot. Perhaps second hand smoke? Nobody yet saw any real data suggesting any problem with this.
Right before covid, it was over 50% were non-smokers and no occupational reasons.
There was big research in Canada to evaluate radon but that came up false. Cancer clusters would seem like a radon relation but evidently not.
There is a positive correlation between diesel exhaust but certainly not explanatory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust
A known bigger issue is causing cancer and we need to address this. Not continue pretending like it's just smokers or old people. I guess that's the plan though? Having figured out this flag worthy controversial reason I do understand why they make this decision. It is and isn't a conspiracy. They are choosing probably the right decision.
I'll just leave these here because I can't reply to anyone else.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34483925/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5835698/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32971268/
Hell ya Mexico and China!
Personally, I would be very careful about the confidence with which I express this perspective. It might be true, but it's not at all clear that it is, so it's not clear there is a mystery.
“It is well-documented that approximately 20% of lung cancer cases that occur in women in the U.S. and 9% of cases in men, are diagnosed in never-smokers,”
"To a great extent, this is a function of straightforward math... Fewer people smoke today than in previous decades... because there are fewer smokers in the population, out of every 100 lung cancer patients, fewer will therefore be smokers. And that means more of them will be never-smokers."
"There are also hints that the absolute incidence of lung cancer in never-smokers has been rising, said oncologist John Heymach of MD Anderson Cancer Center. Some data say it has, but other data say no. The stumbling block is that old datasets often don’t indicate a lung cancer patient’s smoking status, Heymach said, making it impossible to calculate what percent of never-smokers in past decades developed lung cancer."
https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-ca....
>A couple of data points. It looks like 20% is only in women - in men, it's 9%. Second, the ratio of smokers:nonsmokers can be at least partially explained by the number of smokers decreasing. Third, it's not clear whether this is a real change, or if it's a data anomaly.
This is something I didn't fully understand and had to research. Why does it disproportionately affecting black people and women more? Nobody really explains it but the answer is known.
Yes absolutely, as # of smokers decreases we would expect it to increase. Totally, but the correlation between decrease in tobacco usage and increase in lung cancer inverted. I think that's why when we saw an increase in 2006ish nobody responded like they have been responding in the last 5 or so years.
>Personally, I would be very careful about the confidence with which I express this perspective. It might be true, but it's not at all clear that it is, so it's not clear there is a mystery.
I hear your threat and yes I'm flagged and such.
>“It is well-documented that approximately 20% of lung cancer cases that occur in women in the U.S. and 9% of cases in men, are diagnosed in never-smokers,”
I believe what you are referencing is:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2764546/
This study was done in 2006 publishing in 2007. Yes absolutely. 20% vs 9% was certainly a thing in around this time. Those numbers are US centric. Your followup point that fewer smokers exist and therefore more proportion would be expected to trend upwards no doubt and it did.
>"To a great extent, this is a function of straightforward math... Fewer people smoke today than in previous decades... because there are fewer smokers in the population, out of every 100 lung cancer patients, fewer will therefore be smokers. And that means more of them will be never-smokers."
This is totally valid and so is diesel exhaust as others mentioned. VW diesel scandal was also in this period as a painful confounder but at the same time I actually discount VW being of significant factor because how many people really drove TDIs?
>A 2017 study of 12,103 lung cancer patients in three representative U.S. hospitals found that never-smokers were 8% of the total from 1990 to 1995 but 14.9% from 2011 to 2013. The authors ruled out statistical anomalies and concluded that “the actual incidence of lung cancer in never smokers is increasing.” Another study that same year, of 2,170 patients in the U.K., found an even larger increase: The proportion of lung cancer patients who were never-smokers rose from 13% in 2008 to 28% in 2014.
From your link ^^^
About the time of that 2017 study from your article was when oncologists started freaking out by the shift in the new data.
It has been getting worse each year. It's way too fast to be just a shift in statistics. It's also not a mystery neither. Obviously they spent the last ~5 years figuring it out.
It's clear to me that you and the doctors know that... But then why is this metric even mentioned?
20% versus 9% women/men... Are men just smoking more?
It all feels like smoke and mirrors to me.
I think we all agree as well that tobacco smoking is bad and should stop.
But not only are we never getting there, we also know this isn't the sole source of lung cancer or cancer in general.
It's even possible that some new chemical or something else anytime in history might show up and start causing cancer far worse than tobacco. This is a proactive measurement that is necessary ongoing the rest of history or at least until we eliminate cancer in some manner.
We also ultimately always want to be trending downwards. It means we know what we are doing and are improving the situation. If the situation is regressing, that's fine but as expected the appropriate people analyzed WHY. The answer they found... politically problematic. Same reason I'm flagged and unable to post on HN now.
In relation to your links above, I will also link
https://www.cancertreatmentsresearch.com/fenbendazole/?highl...
Conspiracy or a lagging indicator of reduced cigarette consumption?
The graph I linked has a lagging indicator factor to be sure.
Tobacco consumption from 1970s to today has dropped for obvious reasons.
Lung cancer dropped from 1990s to 2006 or so in a highly correlative rate to tobacco consumption. Which is great news!
But suddenly since 2006 lung cancer rates have dramatically increased. It's now above the lung cancer peak in the 1990s.
The conspiracy mainly being they dont show you the huge increase since 2006 and keep their graphs clean.
The allegation that tobacco toxicity kept lung cancer in balance is possible but certainly unproven.
Instead what my other link tried to show is that perhaps tobacco use isn't the boogeyman and hell you probably noticed governments have given up on the anti-tobacco game.
We now know what's causing it but what's the consequences to society if we published? Oh man I could see the collapse of society so quick.
As for the other claims, I haven't done any research, but it sounds vaguely like Simpson's paradox could be starting to dominate the graphs, so they stopped publishing them. (i.e. there are other confounding variables that now dominate, so it is not worth the research time and money to continue collecting that data specifically for smoking rather than looking for new causes)