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Comment by randcraw | Hacker News Reader

The gorilla question: what has changed in the past 33 years to cause this increase? I'd look first at confounding variables like 33 years of improved methods to detect cancer earlier: the rise of MRI, screening for chemical signatures of cancer (like PSA), etc.

The abstract didn't suggest the authors filtered out more recent methods of detection from their data (i.e. detections based only on 1990-era tests like physical exam, 2D X-Ray, etc).

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Eh, yeah the earlier detection are a factor in the detection numbers. However, the fact that early onset mortality rates have also risen seems to indicate that this isn't only an obversational issue. This still points to a real issue.

>I'd look first at confounding variables like 33 years of improved methods to detect cancer earlier: the rise of MRI, screening for chemical signatures of cancer (like PSA), etc.

Early detection is one thing, but is cancer generally hard to detect by the time it's fatal?

If something else kills you then yeah

Some of the ones listed in the study certainly can be, like colorectal.

young people don't get screened for colorectal cancer.

Am I reading the chart wrong or are DALYs (Disability-adjusted Life Years) down for almost everything beside breast cancer?

This seems like we're just getting better at detecting cancer earlier (especially breast cancer), and preventing it from killing you younger - not that cancer is a way bigger problem.

In fact - if you look at deaths - it also looks like it's down for most things, too - breast cancer being a major outlier.

But everyone else seems to be interpreting this the other way - so I'm hoping someone can explain why the DALY figures don't mean what I think they mean.

Since we're much better at detecting breast cancer early, why aren't breast cancer deaths down the most? Is this because treating breast cancer is particularly difficult, more-so than other cancers, or is something causing more breast cancer than before?

Breast cancer isn't particularly fatal now.

Treatment has been pretty decent for at least 10 years.

I'm surprised that deaths per 100k are up. I'm not sure if they adjusted this to account for the fact that the global population is older now than in 1990.

But DALYs should cover that (which is still a strange outlier for breast cancer, but nothing major).

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