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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Cancer rates are rising rapidly. Soon 50% of people will have cancer. I’d say something is going on

Aren't you a Google search away from seeing that this is the opposite of the truth? I'm asking because I didn't look very hard, but I'm on IARC's dataviz site right now looking at a graph of cancer rates --- all causes excluding non-melanoma skin cancer --- sharply down since the '50s (no surprise, tobacco), and also down since the 1990s. You can find cancer sites that break that trend, like bladder cancer, but (for instance) that's down in the period between the introduction of aspartame and the mid-2000s.

Moreover, if you specialize on GI cancers, it looks like you see the opposite of what you'd expect if aspartame was a potent carcinogen: the rates are lower in places where Diet Coke is more prevalent.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong numbers, but I really think this is a result some people on message boards just want to see.

Do you want to post that link if you're on the site? I'm guessing you're looking at cancer mortality rates rather than cancer diagnosis rates. Because while the former has decreased since 1950 due to improvements in treatment, I'm pretty sure the latter has risen since 1950.

I closed the tab since last night, but if you Google "IARC dataviz" you're probably going to get it as the first Google search result. It's a site IARC runs itself, with historical data visualizations.

Right it was as I thought. Cancer incidence rate was increasing since 1960

https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...

while cancer mortality rate was decreasing since 1980

https://nordcan.iarc.fr/en/dataviz/trends?mode=cancer&multip...

From NIH's National Cancer institute:

* Approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2015–2017 data). This is no where near 50% of people "having cancer".

* The rate of new cases of cancer (cancer incidence) is 442.4 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 cases). (.442%)

* The cancer death rate (cancer mortality) is 158.3 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2013–2017 deaths) (.158%).

Regardless, these numbers are very scary.

Those numbers have been about the same in the last two decades. The numbers have always been that high.

40% is definitely near 50%

"will have" infers a future present though. 40% will have at some point in their life is substantively different than 50% having at a single moment in time

Those numbers are context-less. Cancer is what happens to you if something else doesn't kill you first.

Exactly this. The prevalence of cancer in my family is pushing 100%. However, the onset is almost always in the mid/upper 80s to early 90s. So it's not really that cancer is a problem for my family as much as it seems like living long enough to get killed by it is.

This just says we're living longer, not that cancer is suddenly becoming an epidemic.

Live long enough and you will get cancer.

Something is bound to get ya. As we get better at managing other diseases and risks, cancer - which is seldom truly curable - gets a larger share.

The progress on other fronts really is staggering. Forget pre-industrial times: global child mortality is half of what it was in the 1980s. The same is true for vehicle deaths in the US.

Well, I'd also say that as society continues to get more complex we're exposed to more and more previously-unknown substances, chemicals, and compounds. Kids used to play in the DDT mist sprayed by trucks. How many DDTs are there right now that we don't know about? I'd guess a whole lot.

Ultra and highly processed foods are terrible for us. Consuming so much more sugar than in nature seems to be bad for glucose intolerance. I love bacon but I try to resist ever having any. Don't buy meats with nitrates.

We do have way more cancers, a big reason we know about is our food choices. We don't even know the impact of hard things to measure yet, like the impact of all these things on our gut biology. It's not a new discovery that eating a lot of sugary foods leads to greatly increased diabetes, and now we are learning more about how artificial sugars have their own impact. So basically, it's increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are not good for you too, maybe in different ways than "natural sugars".

> I love bacon but I try to resist ever having any. Don't buy meats with nitrates.

That is no way to live.

In general, you should think about risk management, not exclusion. Have your bacon as a bi-monthly treat, and splurge for some high quality bacon at the butcher.

I remember seeing a video of a talk where the host asked who was managing their health by going partially or fully vegetarian. Lots of raised hands. Then he asked who was sitting or standing still for extended amounts of time. Even more raised hands, including almost all of the previous group. And that’s a higher cancer risk than meat eating :)

In the name of sanity, let’s all avoid “biweekly” and “bimonthly”. Just say twice a X to be clear. Pretty funny how the dictionary claims to be largely neutral by only reflecting the cultural ambiguity. I want an f-ing opinionated dictionary that says: avoid this ambiguous word!

If you mix the definitions, biweekly and bimonthly can even be the same timeframe!

Or, since we have a word already, we could use that... Fortnightly. Biweekly needs to mean, specifically, twice a week.

I like that. And we could use halfweekly to mean twice a week. And halfmonthly to mean somewhere between 14 and 15.5 days.

It is not increasingly obvious that artificial sugar drinks are bad for you, and the cancers linked to nitrates are also down significantly in the US over the last 40 years. That's certainly not because people are eating less bacon, or because grocery store bacon has less nitrates in it ("nitrate-free bacon" is a fraud).

You're seeing half the picture. Cancer is, in the large majority of cases, a preventable disease. It is caused mainly by environmental factors, i.e. the modern way of a sedentary obese lifestyle.

A Cancer maybe preventable. Cancer in general is most certainly not a preventable disease. The only thing you can do is stall it. There is no lifestyle that ensures you will not get cancer.

Its worth noting that we all die of something. When I see stats that rank cause of death, I'd love to see it adjusted for age.

It would be interesting if death rates had a cut-off. Don't tell me that 50% die of heart disease, rather exclude everyone over 70, then tell me percentages.

For most of my life the largest causes of death are accidents and suicide, but equally the age-group either the highest rate are over 75s.

Sure there ways to improve both quantity, and quality, of life. Smoking pretty obviously reduces both - its a good habit to quit, or not start. Chugging DDT is bad for you. But linking foods to longevity, where there is unconvincing evidence, isn't helpful to me.

Especially when that food has significant quality-of-life benefits.

Ultimately we all die of something. A death "saved" here, is a death "gained" there.

We're getting fatter and sitting in a chair all day. It's pretty well known that lack of exercise is a significant cancer risk.

Does this correlate with life expectancy?

We're better at seeing cancer now. Maybe people used to get small cancers that just went away. Which sounds insane I know! But you can be perfectly health, get a body scan, find a lump of something doing nothing and then you're on the big C train all of a sudden.

Citation?

And if sweeteners were at play (sucralose also has scary new research) I couldn't see why the food industry, the paid off gov regulators and insurance companies would cover this up and short the involved companies.

The latest figures point to 1/3 of people in the world will die due to cancer, and the statistics always have been close to that. Where are you getting the 50% figure from?

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