The death rate for people with prostate cancer fell for 20 years but now it has hit a wall. Researchers say that this trend is coinciding with a decline in screening for prostate cancer.
Incidences of advanced prostate cancer are also rising.
Stabilizing Death Rate Of Prostate Cancer
A new study by the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Cancer Society, and North American Association of Central Cancer Registries looked into the recent changes in prostate cancer trends. Findings in the study do not point to one cause as the reason for the stabilizing in death rates of prostate cancer. Trends do show that screening has declined.
In 2012, a federal advisory committee discouraged the use of screening of prostate cancer through prostate-specific antigen tests. This task force said that too many men were being harmed with treatment for early-stage malignancies that didn't have to be treated this aggressively.
The same task force then revised its stance in early May 2018, it said that men 55 to 69 years old should make a decision on screenings after consulting their doctors. They still recommend that men over the age of 70 shouldn't get prostate-specific antigen.
Overall incidences of prostate cancer decreased an average of 6.5 percent from 2007 to 2014. Incidences of prostate cancer spreading to other parts of the body increased from 2010 to 2014.
Overall Report On Cancer
The second study released in the journal Cancer, the same researchers found that overall death rates across gender, age groups, racial and ethnic groups continue to decline. Something that the numbers don't show is the variation in the survival rates for different types of cancer.
Five-year survival rates are high for early-stage prostate, breast, and colorectal cancer but lower for all stages of lung cancer. There has also been a rise in the mortality rates for liver, pancreatic, and uterine cancer.
Mortality rates have dropped for 11 of 18 types of cancer in men, and 14 of 20 types of cancer in women from 20011 to 2015. Incidences of cancer have increased in children, remain static in women, and dropped for men. Men are more likely to be diagnosed and die of cancer than women are.
Reasons for the drop in cancer rates include less smoking, earlier diagnoses, and better treatments. Smoking is responsible for more than 25 percent of cancer deaths in the United States.
There was also racial disparity, the report says that except for female lung cancer, black men and black women have the highest death rates for cancer sites with the highest mortality in the population, these include lung, prostate, female breast, colorectal, and pancreas.
