Breast cancer[/caption]Since the enactment of the in 1971 the National Cancer Act was enacted. Since then the United States has spent many billions of dollars researching and treating the disease, and the newest research offers real evidence that we are winning the war against cancer. The future, however, is hopeful given the progress to date, as observed in the research recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
The lead researcher, Samir Soneji, PhD, assistant professor for Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, a member of Norris Cotton Cancer Center, has this to say, “As fewer and fewer people die from heart disease, stroke, and accidents, more and more people are alive long enough to be at risk of developing and dying from cancer.”
Mortality rates from heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and accidents declined 62 percent, 73 percent, and 38 percent, respectively between 1970 and 2008 . In the same period, cancer mortality rates declined just 12 percent.
Researchers examined these differences and used a metric to look at the burden of cancer mortality, which is called the years of life lost due to cancer and is the consequences of how much longer we are expected to live if we don’t have cancer. Then the researchers looked at that burden of cancer mortality and assessed how advancements in cancer care had directly improved that burden and how advancements in the care of other diseases might have impacted the burden negatively.
Because progress in the treatment of other diseases other than cancer have decreased mortality rates, people are living longer, which means an increase proportionately in the years of life lost from cancer.
“We estimate how the years of life lost from cancer are directly affected by cancer mortality and indirectly affected by increased cancer incidence because of greater longevity due to improvements in primary prevention, detection, and treatment of other disease,” said Soneji. Using this approach to the problem researchers were able to measure the progress made in the burden of cancer mortality.
As one example, lung cancer mortality rates between 1985 and 2005 significantly reduced the burden of lung cancer mortality. But as mortality rates decreased in other areas of disease management and life expectancy increased, some of these changes partially offset the progress seen in the longevity of patients. Yet smoking definitely reduced the burden of cancer mortality.
As researchers examined life expectancy increases brought about by reducing mortality rates from diseases other than cancer, it allowed them to see the real progress actually made in the treatment of cancer, observing that other measures that had been used had not accounted for these factors. “Our approach reveals more accurately the aggregate contribution of cancer prevention, screening, and treatment on progress against cancer,” said Soneji.
To date, survival time and mortality rates have been the leading population-level measures of cancer burden. These measures assess the effect of prevention, screening, and treatment on cancer, but they fail to account for changes in other-cause mortality rates.
This is good news in supporting the hope of winning the war against cancer.
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