Are We Making Progress in the War on Cancer?
The news on cancer is good - even though cancer deaths are rising
Twice as many people die of cancer today as did in the 1980s.
At first glance, this sounds like bad news. It seems to suggest we’re losing the war on cancer.
But not so fast.
The raw number of cancer deaths has risen - but so has the size of the population. Once we take that into account, the picture changes. Adjusted for population growth, cancer deaths per capita are roughly the same as they were in the 80s.
This might suggest we’ve made no real progress in the war on cancer - that we’ve just been treading water.
But again, not so fast.
Cancer deaths per capita haven’t budged, but the population is older today than it was in the 1980s, and cancer is more common among older people. A fair comparison would take age into account as well. When we do that - using what epidemiologists call age-standardized rates - we find we’ve actually made considerable progress in the fight against cancer.
Specifically, someone who gets cancer today is much more likely to survive than someone of the same age who got cancer forty years ago - as shown in the graph below.
This is a good example of how easy it is to misread trends in public health. Raw numbers can point in one direction, while properly adjusted data point in another. If we want to know whether we’re making progress, we need to make sure we have the right metric.
This post was inspired by a tweet from Our World in Data. For more details, see their post on age standardization of health metrics here.
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