The risk of any given disease 1) occurring and 2) contributing to mortality rises proportionally with age. More generally, age is a risk factor for the majorit

The risk of any given disease 1) occurring and 2) contributing to mortality rises proportionally with age. More generally, age is a risk factor for the majority of diseases. One result of the increasing life expectancy in the general case is that mortality from degenerative disease must necessarily increase, unless the rate of improvement in a given disease's treatment effectiveness is greater year-over-year than the risk differential from simply getting older. That sounds easy but history suggests otherwise (progress is spiky, and while elucidation of risk factors is getting faster and faster, the follow-on work of treating consequences hasn't accelerated apace) This is particularly important for degenerative diseases of the sort that most cancers represent, namely, accumulated genetic damage leading to what seems to be de-differentiation and malignant re-differentiation of one or more cell types into something bad. This is not entirely unlike what happens when an embryo becomes a fetus, with the unfortunate side effect that the host must 'deliver' surgically and the location of the 'child' is unknown (and in some cases unknowable). If you have children, you can perhaps relate to the systemic burden of such a situation. Now just take that kid and put it in a person's pancreas, or their white blood cells, and try to figure out how to do a 'C-section' or 'morning-after pill' effectively. Depending on the specific pathology, it may be almost impossible. Anyhow, while it is true that earlier diagnosis can influence the recorded survival times, if you rip into the data using (eg.) Cox regression, the hazard rates do change with treatment, and that's about all you can ask for until we figure out how to target individual cell types for apoptosis in an agreeable fashion :-)