Cancer 'Tidal Wave' on Horizon, Warns WHO
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
If we look carefully at charts of death rates by all causes for either the United States or the developed world, we see that death rates from cancer and from most causes of death are still steadily falling at all ages. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
Yes, we still need to do more research on cancer prevention and cancer treatment. Yes, the article is correct that smoking, infectious diseases (mostly viral, some of which are already preventable by vaccines), overuse of alcohol, and obesity all increase cancer risk, but you and I can do something about our use of tobacco, alcohol, and fattening food-and-activity lifestyle combinations today--we don't have to wait for more medical research to reduce our risk of cancer. The article kindly submitted here makes clear that making people more aware of what increases their cancer risk is one of the best interventions for reducing cancer rates and cancer mortality. As other comments have already correctly pointed out, a rise in the number of cancer cases worldwide first of all indicates that there are more people in the world than ever, and secondly indicates that fewer people are dying young of diseases linked to stark poverty. That's good news, on the whole.
Is that really reasonable, though? Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives, and they almost certainly have less free time in which to immerse themselves in a field of math that isn't going to help them.
Journalists, on the other hand, often should or need to rely on statistics to convey useful and pertinent information in a meaningful way. That they often obviously aren't taught and otherwise usually don't learn statistics, or at least not effectively, strikes me as a much bigger problem than doctors who don't have that knowledge.
Now, the people who write reports like these, they should have and use a thorough working understanding of statistics. I'd say what's really missing is effective collaboration between the people who do the work and the people who should be doing and writing the analysis.
2. Frontier areas of medicine -- oncology, psychiatry -- deal increasingly with uncommon situations that not necessarily happen with enough frequency for a doctor to develop a doctorly intuition. There are some great resources -- meta-analyses, for example -- out there, but if we keep cutting slack to practitioners and let them follow the word of "thought leaders", medicine becomes the prey of ideological waves and conceptual fashions.
You can't give patients good advice that allows them to make the trade-offs inherent in life without a solid grasp of statistics. Saying an IUD has 98% effectiveness is useless without citing the time span over which that probability is measured (2% will get pregnant per year, per 5 years, ever?) Saying that doing X increases the risk of outcome Y by Z% is useless without citing the base rate. Would you stop eating meat if it increased your risk of a rare cancer by 300% if the base rate was 0.01% (over a lifetime) to begin with? I don't know how you make diagnoses without knowing the relative statistical probability of conditions that may present with the same symptoms.
I really think that depends on what they are doing. My girlfriend is a neurologist investigating new treatments from MS. She uses statistics packages daily. Her colleague has gone of to London for a year to study a statistics masters. Sure your average GP probably doesn't have much need for stats, but there are a lot of fields within medicine.
Today, a lot of people have degrees and even the ones who don't have the opportunity to engage with a lot of self education through the internet, a lot of it informal (like HN). Doctors are also more knowledgable than they were but the gap has narrowed. The difference between doctors and the median (or 75 percentile) person has narrowed. Obviously, they still know a helva lot more about medicine, especially in their specialization but when it comes to Science as a discipline or statistics/math/etc., they aren't that far ahead of the pack.
*BTW, oncologists are probably the most versed in science, research methodology & statistics because they participate in a lot of research and choosing a course of treatment may be a choice between treatments based of studies with samples of insufficient size or duration to make absolute statements about. One study follows remission rates of patients segmented by the presence of specific genes in the cancer. Another remission rates for a slightly modified treatment and slightly different segmentation. etc.
Anyway, I don't think cases is irrelevant or incorrect thing to look at here. The number of cases is the number of people that need to be treated. If you are talking about prevention, the number of cases is a relevant indicator of success.
And then there are other diseases we have no cure for yet, which are not cancer, such as Alzheimers and aids. We can eradicate those, I believe.
Better to try to replace each part as it breaks with an upgrade! That's my immortality plan- when my hearing breaks, get an implant. When the hip goes out, in goes a titanium one. You mind starts slipping? We're going to need some sort of prosthetic neurons, I'm thinking carbon nanotubes you inject into you spinal fluid and which self-assemble inside the brain. Eventually, enough meat has been replaced with tech that my mind can make the complete jump to software and at which point I shed this frail human form and proceed to explore the universe via self-replicating probes... Well, that's the plan anyways.
But either way, to beat cancer, you going to need to fundamentally redesign the human form.
ps (Elon Musk, if you are reading this, please contact me. I'm really don't want to die and I'm willing to act as a guinea pig towards that end)
You think that you have organs, but really, you have cells. When those cells break in a particular way, cancer results. 99.999% of those cancers are terminated. The rest can kill.
Preventing cancer is a matter of adding 9s to that statistic until death is implausible. Then, we run up against other senescence factors: our cells can only divide so many times, garbage accumulates that can't be purged, etc.
It's plausible to imagine a world where we no longer die of cancer, adding 10-20 years to the average lifespan. People will start to die of obscure diseases caused by genes no longer being present in their DNA.
So we work on fixing that. It's difficult, of course.
I kind of see your point but you seem to be forgetting about the children who die from cancer. Not to mention the types of cancer that are more common in younger people (e.g. testicular cancer). In the past living long enough to bear children may have been considered a good thing - you didn't die from an infection we had no cure for. The people who die from the disease probably don't see it the same way and I doubt you would either. Even though I understand your premise if I got cancer even in my 90's I wouldn't be thinking: "Wow, look how long I lived", I'd be thinking, "Shit, I have cancer".
In the USA, 3X as many children die of car crashes than cancer, and solving car crashes is way easier than solving cancer. Want to save just as many kids as you would by curing cancer? Stop driving so fast.
http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm
http://www.childdeathreview.org/nationalchildmortalitydata.h...
Hopefully more computer assisted driving will make a big difference to road traffic deaths.
Of course you have no way of knowing ahead of time whether or not the treatments will work... If you have most of your life ahead of you, fight the cancer. But if I get cancer at 75 (which I very well may, if genetics play a role in these things), I'm considering choosing to forgo treatment in order to save everyone pain, time, and money. I just don't think it would be worth living like deathly sick person for potentially years, only to die at 82 of something else.
The radiation and chemo helped my aunt live about 10 years longer than she would have if left untreated. It was totally worth it.
Plus, the drugs at the hospital helped ease the pain when she passed.
SAD THING another knock against pediatric cancer. Pediatric cancer get's less then 4% of Federal Funding and American Cancer Society gives less then 1% toward it. Now these numbers will be used to funnel more money away from finding a cure for neglected research. Not one new chemotherapy drug for pediatric cancer in 24 years!!!!
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/druginfo/fda-nelarabine
Also, if you looked up the number of pediatric cancer cases as a total of all cancer cases, the 4% makes sense. I dug the numbers up a while ago, but you can find them with a quick google search.
"The global cancer burden is increasing and quite markedly, due predominately to the ageing of the populations and population growth."
Watched it sipping sugared tea over a slice of apple pie though.
It is probably the single best talk I've seen this year.
There really doesn't seem to be anything to be alarmed about. There will be about 73million deaths in 2035 (looking at current death rates vs. expected world population). If everyone who gets cancer dies from it in a year, there will be 24m deaths due to it, although http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_survival_rates indicates that cancer seems to have a >70% survival rate, in general. In 20 years, it's likely that survival rate will also be reflected in developing countries. So really, only about 7.2m, or about 10%, of our mortality will likely be due to cancer. That's still a lot, and it's worthwhile to try to prevent as many of those deaths as possible. But cancer seems like it's not, statistically, our biggest threat.
He said there was a similar argument to be had with sugar fuelling obesity, which in turn affected cancer risk.'
I'm all for educating the public, but why does it seem that education is never enough for some, and instead the next step needs to be behavior modification through scarcity?
Haven't we seen this fail in the U.S. with the ridiculous restrictions on some over-the-counter medications, the War on Drugs, and Prohibition?
In Portugal, Spain and Italy alcohol is food. We drink at home, with the family, a great amount of wine and a little beer. Wine and beer are openly sold in supermarkets, close to other food. However, the biggest alcoholism problem we have are American, British and Australian tourists binge drinking in our beaches.
OTOH, in North America it seems there are only 2 extreme ways of handling alcohol: the Russian-like approach and the Muslim-like panic. Teenagers and poor people abuse it and drink heavily, all the others are obsessively scared of it.
This isn't true at all. You're seeing the extreme cases and generalizing it to everybody. We may have a higher incidence of alcoholism and alcohol abuse (I don't know the numbers), but the vast majority of Americans use alcohol occasionally and responsibly.
Education is important but for many people in the developed world their exposure to liquor ads on TV is a lot more prevalent than their exposure to education. You're fighting a losing battle if you're competing directly with the messages of liquor companies (same thing in tobacco industry).
As for pricing, in many countries including the US with their new insurance system the cost of healthcare is being shared across large groups. In Canada we tax liquor at a rate of about 130% and feed much of that revenue directly into our healthcare system. This way the more you drink the more you contribute to your future expense to the healthcare system.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/09/why-alcohol-i...
Can someone explain this? I'm guessing it's something referring to cervical cancer.
Those who have a pregnancy before 20 years of age versus those who have a pregnancy after 35 years of age show a 50% reduction in their risk of breast cancer.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/prevention/breast/hea...
Delayed parenthood: old eggs are around 1% more likely to result in childhood cancers (more or less, at least sometimes, per some swedes). A bit controversial although it seems fairly common sense. Obviously a 45 year old woman's eggs will have been exposed to three times the radiation as a 15 year old girl's eggs, and given that I'm surprised the net childhood cancer risk was so low. From the original paper, which I'm probably misinterpreting, if the kid lives to age 5, there's no further measurable effect, so either the cancer kills them young or it has no effect, and I have no common sense explanation for that...
Fewer children: Seems fairly well proven across many papers that time spent pregnant equals lower ovarian cancer risk. This does not appear controversial. Then again time spent pregnant does seem to increase pregnancy related mortality (duh) so not entirely sure its a net positive.
No idea at all about the last claim. Probably something lactation hormone related. I don't think mere calcium loss is a legit anti-cancer treatment.
Having your first pregnancy before 20 versus after 35 lowers your chance of breast cancer by 50%.
For each birth, breast cancer risk decreases by 7%.
For each year of breast feeding, breast cancer risks decreases by 4%
Source: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/prevention/breast/hea...
The mechanism isn't entirely worked out, but the hypothesis is that immature breast cells are more likely to cause cancer, and that pregnancy and breastfeeding cause breast cells to mature into cells that are less likely to become cancerous.
This paper explores the mechanism more: http://erc.endocrinology-journals.org/content/14/4/907.full
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/oral-contr...
If you get a chance to read it, you'll find the studies of the effects of some animal proteins, specifically casein, on propensity to develop cancer when organisms are challenged by mutagens and carcinogens to be rigorous science and important for our daily lives.
The book encourages eating vegan, which is not hard, just different, and is a diet whose positive health effects are supported by large scale epidemiological studies.
The infectious diseases can be classified by the pathogen: virus and bacteria (and prions?). We have vaccines for a few of them, it’s an important subset because they caused many dead. Vaccines are very specific, each one is against only one illness, or even only against some strains of the pathogens. (It’s possible to combine some of them to reduce the number of independent shots.)
We have eradicated smallpox! And I hope we will eradicate polio in my lifetime. There are many generic antibiotics against a lot of bacteria, and recently appeared some antiviral drugs. But the eradication or cure of all the infectious diseases is still a very long term objective.
The treatment for cancer has improved a lot. It’s a more difficult statistic that simply counting the number of dead, but it’s a hope. Also the tools for diagnosis have improved a lot, and that reduces the rate of false negatives and false positives, for example MRI.
Some cancers are clearly linked to virus. The most well known case is the cervical cancer (and a few similar cancers in other parts of the body). It’s (mostly) caused by the Human papillomavirus. There is a recent vaccine against the HPV, and it’s beginning to be applied massively. So I hope that in 50 years the number of cervical cancers will have lowered an almost disappear, but there will be still cervical cancer dew to radiation, chemical mutations, and other causes. There are other cancers that probably have a viral origin, and perhaps it’s possible to create a vaccine and eradicate them.
It’s possible to eliminate or cure some types of cancer, but a complete solution is almost impossible.