4 ms·
Death rate has dropped half in a century because of medical advances, but cancer-related deaths have tripled - why?
by melvinmt 14y ago
Death rate has dropped half in a century because of medical advances, but cancer-related deaths have tripled - why?
- cullenking 14y agoThe longer you live, the longer you have to get cancer.
- jsolson 14y agoThere are a few possible explanations for this, although three obvious ones jump to mind: 1) There is more cancer today or the cancers are more lethal. 2) We are better at diagnosing cancer today. 3) We've eliminated (or dramatically reduced) a lot of the things that aren't cancer that can kill you. My money is that it's mostly 2+3, and that those have brought about a bit of 1.
- jaredhansen 14y agoThere may be myriad other causes (on which I'm largely ignorant), but one reason cancer kills more people than it used to is that more people are living long enough to be killed by cancer instead of something else. It frequently takes a fair amount of time for the various micro-level problems in cells to develop into cancer, and then it takes some additional time for that cancer to get bad enough to kill you - which is why young people rarely die of it, and one reason why "death by cancer" will be rare when everyone dies of something else while they're still too young to have had much cancer risk.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoPeople live long enough to have cancer.
- rauljara 14y agoEveryone dies eventually. The deaths that would have been from whatever is no longer killing us are being taken over by something else that still does. Or, another way to look at it: we are living long enough now that we have a much better chance of contracting cancer during our lives.
- chrischen 14y agoBecause God ran out of other ways to kill people... And everybody still has to die of something, sometime.