11 ms·
Differences in cancer rates among adults born between 1920 and 1990
- jppope 2y agoWell that sucks... and feels weird considering we all drink and smoke less than the old timers did.
- drewcoo 2y agoIncidence rates are detection rates. Does that suck less?
- 082349872349872 2y ago> drink and smoke less It would make sense that if heart disease or emphysema (or for that matter, just some drunk driver) don't get you while younger, some cancer will get you while older?
- toomuchtodo 2y agoObesity is a material contributing factor in cancer rates [1] [2] [3], although GLP-1 agonists are a potential mitigation against Western diet at scale [4]. Does not solve for PFAS, microplastics [5], and other potential environmental factors causing mutations that potentially lead to cancer unfortunately. Hopefully, we make immunotherapy progress faster than we poison ourselves with pollution and poor diet. [1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/obesity/obesity-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o... [2] https://www.who.int/azerbaijan/news/item/03-05-2022-obesity-causes-cancer-and-is-major-determinant-of-disability-and-death--warns-new-who-report https://www.who.int/azerbaijan/news/item/03-05-2022-obesity-... [3] https://www.wcrf.org/new-study-links-overweight-and-obesity-to-more-cancers-than-previously-shown/ https://www.wcrf.org/new-study-links-overweight-and-obesity-... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41088421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41088421 [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10340669/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10340669/
- Mistletoe 2y ago1960–1962: About 13% of adults were obese 1971–1974: About 5% of children were obese 1980: 13.4% of adults were obese 2008: 34.3% of adults were obese 2009–2010: 36% of adults were obese 2014: 36.5% of adults were obese 2017–2018: 42.4% of adults were obese A truly astonishing set of data. I assume this has never happened in human history at this scale.
- tsunamifury 2y agoWe are dying of abundance
- ponector 2y agoMostly Americans and some island nations. Many developed countries have much healthier people.
- Mistletoe 2y agoI decided to check for Finland, a country I’ve often fantasized about moving to since it often scores very highly on happiness maps. > As of December 2023, Finland's obesity rate is 27% for men and 30% for women, with a body mass index (BMI) above the obesity threshold of 30 kg/m2. This is higher than the EU average and has increased significantly in recent decades. Obesity is most prevalent among people aged 40–64, with one in three in this age group being obese. Abdominal obesity is also common, affecting almost half of adults. It seems to be quite bad other places too.
- protomolecule 2y ago>Finland ... often scores very highly on happiness maps. A Finnish comedian has something to say about that) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt94AnJ8urA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt94AnJ8urA
- ghnws 2y agoSedetary life style combined with lots of sausages, red meat an butter does that to a people. Alcohol is also a huge problem in Finland. Not uncommon for men to drink beer daily.
- danybittel 2y agoBut we eat more. People often seem to not realize that overweight is a risk factor for cancer.
- isoprophlex 2y agoHowever, ultra-processed foods are at an all time high for the most recent birth cohort in the study
- verisimi 2y agoIt's almost like the massive health industry isn't helping at all, and is more interested in making profit off the long term ill.
- fguerraz 2y agoOr, it could just be that everything is self-explanatory: higher incidence because of better and earlier diagnosis, and incidentally lower fatality rate because cancers are chaught earlier.
- haunter 2y ago> all drink and smoke less than the old timers did I’m not even sure about that.
- Refusing23 2y agodiet has changed. a lot more processed foods and drinks. hell, even cooking oils are kinda 'new' and barely existed 100 years ago
- doctoboggan 2y agoDo they somehow control for changing (improving) detection capabilities? I did see this mentioned: > Additionally, the increased use of diagnostic testing and overdiagnosis probably contributed to the rise in incidence rates of cancers that are highly sensitive to diagnostic scrutiny So they did consider it, but I am not sure if/how they attempted to control for it.
- zug_zug 2y agoWell, it looks to me like they look at 34 types of cancer, and found that 8 of those were increasing. So "we detect cancer better" isn't really a good theory, unless it just so happens we only have improved our detection for 8 of those cancers. Would love for somebody more knowledgeable who read the whole paper to weigh-in.
- luigi23 2y agono, they just mentioned it because they're aware of that but cannot control it and might affect the end result. makes sense - it used to be underdiagnosed and now with bigger push for prevention this might introduce more false positives.
- jessriedel 2y agoIt's sufficiently important for interpreting their results that it should be in the abstract
- sydbarrett74 2y agoToo bad glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer remain stubbornly resistant to long-term remission.
- catoc 2y agoOr even short-term for that matter: even for localized pancreatic adenocarcinoma (not metastasized to lymph nodes or beyond) only 50% of patients survive their first year. For glioblastoma it is even worse: only 25% one-year survival rate
- bruce511 2y agoAh my good friend statistics. It's all about the probabilities, and ratios, and comparisons. But being somewhat light on the details that matter. So sure, incidences of cancer are going up, and while I briefly read the article I didn't deep dive into the data. I'll presume they corrected for population growth, the decline in other mortality rates, better testing, more testing, increasing life expectancy etc. Alas youth it's fixated on rate of change, but without (ideally upfront) discussing the are rate. Consider this example; (made up numbers) "Incidences of cancer generally are up 400%". Compared to "incidences of car deaths are down 80%". From those 2 statements alone should you be more worried about cancer or cars? And lots of articles and news report this - rate of change. But rate of change is meaningless without a base number. Consider this (still made up numbers) "Cancer went from killing 1 person per 100 to 4 per hundred" " road deaths went from 95 people per hundred to 19 per hundred". Are you now worried more about cars or cancers? Side note : causes of death is a zero sum game. If one cause decreases the others have to increase. Side note: the most important measure of course is the age if death. If I'm 90 I'm worried about cancer. If I'm 9 cars are a more immediate issue. So yeah, eating more broccoli might reduce my risk of pancreas cancer. But saying it as 'drops the risk 45%' doesn't really help me if the base risk is say 1 in a million. Seat belts though - highly recommended.
- Eisenstein 2y agoCause of death stats are difficult to interpret because people have to die of 'something'. Is cause of death 'drinking and driving' or was it 'drove into a pole at 60mph' or was it 'blood loss' or was it 'medical term for heart stopped beating'. If you wanted to play with stats you could claim any one of these things.
- strogonoff 2y agoCardiac arrest ← blood loss ← impact with a pole at 60 mph ← drunk driving ← [insert the actual root cause] Sadly, that extra step up the causality ladder tends to meet furious resistance from most natural-scientifically-oriented people. It could be as simple as “lack of will to live due to losing a partner in old age”, for instance—one of a variety of conditions with absent motivation to do things that correlate with not dying, or indeed to not do things that inversely correlate with such, therefore trivially leading to death via whatever first available mechanism (drinking to DUI to accident, or smoking to inflammation to cancer, or lack of sleep to chronic inflammation to cancer, and so on). The particular mechanism itself is not the most interesting part, and if the principle is right then eliminating each pathway is going to be a game of whack-a-mole draining healthcare resources while failing to accomplish the presumed goal (happy continued existence of a person).
- Eisenstein 2y agoUnfortunately we don't know if this is attributable to something that happened in the 90s as they were kids and then stopped, or it is ongoing or getting worse.
- blondie9x 2y agoBecause it is increasing by decade we can probably assume its consistent with children now or maintaining along the increasing incidence trend line.
- reducesuffering 2y agoSomething is going very wrong with American cancer rates, especially since the 90s. Just look at this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-incidence?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~African+Region+%28WHO%29~European+Region+%28WHO%29~WHO_SEAR~WHO_WPAC~WHO_EMR~USA~KOR~FRA~DEU~BRA~CAN~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-incidence?tab=char... There's no obvious correlation here, because when you look at things like obesity, other countries had similar increases with no effect on the cancer rate. One outlier use of "mainly the US since 90s" is GMO use, but I don't believe there's much scientific proof of cause there. PFAS? Any other guesses?
- lm28469 2y agoLots of things the US allow in food are banned in the rest of the world, not sure how much of an impact it has though
- reducesuffering 2y agoYa, a start might be the list that California just banned in 2027: brominated vegetable oil, propylparaben, Red No. 3 (erythrosine), and potassium bromate. The FDA just revoked brominated vegetable oil use this month (hello every Mountain Dew you drank). All have been implicated as carcinogens and mostly been banned elsewhere around the world, many since 50 years ago. How have they let industrial poisons in our food so long when everyone else knows better?
- pjc50 2y agoJust like raw milk, there's a libertarian faction that demands to be allowed to drink the poison.
- ifyoubuildit 2y agoIs raw milk somehow equivalent to these things? Those crazy libertarians.
- devonsolomon 2y agoFor those not keeping up, we now have commercialized blood-based screening tools designed for early detection of multiple cancers by analyzing cfDNA methylation patterns. They can identify over 50 types of cancer, have a specificity of 99.5% and can accurately predict the cancer’s origin. The biggest push-back from the medical profession is diagnosing cancers that are not clinically relevant and treatable (eg. A cancer may be detected 15 years before clinically relevant in some cases to my understanding). There is also a cost benefit dynamic of increasing preventative screening, for example lowering the prescribed age for breast screening would save lives but may carry costs for nations or corporations that are unacceptable. Detection is being solved in some incredible ways. To my understanding moonshot catch all treatments are mostly a pipe dream given the diversity of disease under the “cancer” umbrella, and lifestyle based prevention is proving a way bigger factor than historically acknowledged - an inconvenient challenge in addressing the issue societally. It is an endlessly interesting field to keep a track of, and I believe more entrepreneurs should be working on prevention topics!
- bankcust08385 2y agoThe best reactive, futile, end-of-life medical procedures and bankruptcies money can buy rather than reducing suffering with prophylaxis and individualized care identifying root causes sooner. And the ostensible demands for prior evidence to shutdown discussion.
- aquafox 2y ago> The biggest push-back from the medical profession is diagnosing cancers that are not clinically relevant and treatable [...]. There is also a cost benefit dynamic of increasing preventative screening, for example lowering the prescribed age for breast screening would save lives but may carry costs for nations or corporations that are unacceptable. One major driver in not screening for everything that can be screened for is the base rate fallacy [1]: We usually screen for things that are rare in the general population and in that case a large fraction of positive tests are false positives. But each positive test has to be followed up and potentially causes harm (because of invasive biopsies, psychological burden etc.). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
- delichon 2y agoI recently had a cancerous thyroid removed so I've been trying to learn more about it. In this article I learned that the incididence has been skyrocketing. The same chart has a flat mortality trend, confirming what my doctor said about this being one of the better cancers to have if you're going to get one. Some doctors want to stop calling the most common type a cancer and start calling it a non-cancerous neoplasm. But why the large monotonic rise in incidence? Are we somehow getting even less iodine in our food? I'm supplementing with it now, wish I started long ago. It could be part of the problem that we discourage salt consumption. Salt binds with halides like bromide and fluoride, which compete for iodine receptors. The same problem behind thyroid cancer may also contribute to the obesity epidemic by damaging energy metabolism via hypothyroidism. I almost hope so, since then my thyroid hormone replacement may help with weight loss. Or perhaps causation somehow flows in the other direction and obesity contributes to thyroid disease. And much of the increase may simply be from growing diagnostic scrutiny. Thyroid disease is very profitable for the healthcare industry. Treatments are effective for many and are usually life long. So there's great incentive all around to pay more attention to it.
- piuantiderp 2y agoBread used to have iodine added, now it's bromine. Pools would sometimes use iodine, now it's chlorine. Then we have all the brominated flame retardants.. Progress Sorry to hear about your surgery. Do you link it to iodine deficiency or something else?
- delichon 2y agoIt was part of a large goiter. The story I'm hearing is that the thyroid expands into a goiter for the purpose of capturing more iodine from the bloodstream, and a thyroid tumor is a growth defect of the goiter. It seems to be common to treat goiter and their tumors with iodine. But my surgeon made no association between the goiter, tumor and hypothyroid at all and she didn't even recommend iodine. There seems to be a lot of divergent opinion among the pros.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoSo to me, is it nefarious evil corporation pollution, or just lifestyle differences, or just better detection/treatment/knowledge of cancer variations? The biggest change from now to then is obesity which is an umbrella for lack of exercise/activity, sedentary jobs and leisure time, and a vast increase in corn syrup and caloric content in eating. Environmental factors beside nuke testing might be a near-hundred-years of ICE pollution permeating the entire world, microplastics, and other pollution. Vitamin supplements may also help tumor growth. Staying indoors, aside from the exercise impact, may reduce vitamin D production from sunlight which seems to inhibit cancers as well. But eating like crap, not exercising/being active, and being fat are all not-insignificant aspects to cancer. Exercise has dozens of ancillary health benefits that can tie into cancer incidence, sugar is rocket fuel for tumors, and obesity is directly linked to cancer. I honestly hope once EVs and alt energy permeate the energy production and transportation sectors if we see a huge decline in cancer rates a decade later.
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- animal531 2y agoIs there a comparison between the age of conception vs cancer? Ie. in a lot of places people are having children at much higher ages, does that contribute to it or does it have no effect?