8 ms·

Same as mountainriver's comment. I really find strange how I've been reading news lines over the past years about great advancements in many incurable and chron

by lr0 2y ago

Same as mountainriver's comment. I really find strange how I've been reading news lines over the past years about great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases (like Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cancers) yet after all that time people's treatment is not going any better. I'm not sure whether scientific journalism somehow delivered some unintended messages to me, or we're just supposed to experience these great advancements after couple of decades from the announcement.

njtransit 2y ago
Why do you think “people’s treatment is not going any better”? As far as I know, cancer outcomes have greatly improved.
- bb88 2y ago
  It's the articles that decry "Big discovery in X". This could be because the researchers need funding so they will hype the results as much as possible. Then the articles need as much readership so the journalists hype the results as much as possible. Then the people suffering from the disease want as much help as possible so they push the articles/papers to the doctors. On the other hand, it's been my experience that GLP-1 agonsists weren't overhyped, I was completely surprised when my doctor prescribed Mounjaro for weight loss. Even after decades of articles about "NEW WEIGHT LOSS TREATMENT!" (See also phen-phen)
  - markus92 2y ago
    It's mostly the PR department of universities that boast about those big discoveries. Researchers themselves usually try to add some nuance to it.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Cancer detection/testing has gotten a lot more attention. Detected early, many victims are still alive after 5 years and considered "cured." But it still gets you in the end. A lot of expense and misery while under medication/chemo/rad/surgical therapy and in the end you are dead just the same.
  - fzeroracer 2y ago
    I'm not sure why this matters. In the end we're all going to die, death is inescapable. The ultimate form of your rationalization is that we should simply not treat anything because we die all the same. But for many cancers and other diseases not only has early detection gotten better but so has treatment and prognosis. Treatment isn't nearly as bad to go through and long term survival rates are higher. People can live longer with cancer while still being fully functioning.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    That’s the measurement that a lot of Covid deniers liked to roll out. Death isn’t the only metric. Life is a precious and personal thing. Those years mean wishes fulfilled, graduations and weddings celebrated, life lived.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    What else is there? Are you saying immortality or bust?
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      What else is there? Long term remission for example. This is hardly looked at because we don't see any difference.
      - rowanG077 2y ago
        Long term remission is just a few months extra to live. In the end you have people who die quickly and people that live for years. That's why you get averages of a few months extra.
- adamredwoods 2y ago
  Depends. Early cancer? Yes, outlook is getting better. Metastatic cancer? It's still very bad outcomes. (Personal experience.)
echelon 2y ago
Cancer deaths have been falling since the 90's. Detection and treatments are improving. We don't have a silver bullet because these diseases are so incredibly complicated. "Cancer" is a particular type of disease behavior, but is essentially a broad class of failure states across different types of cells and tissues, with different genetic, metabolic, biochemical, and molecular dysfunctions.
- derektank 2y ago
  The decline in cancer deaths can almost entirely be explained by the decline in smoking. Getting from 40% of people smoking to 15% was probably the biggest public health victory of the latter half of the 20th century
  - bb88 2y ago
    similar arguments have been made about lead and leaded gasoline being made illegal in the 70s.
  - bglazer 2y ago
    This is true in the large sense but it obscures that 5 year survival rates have been steadily extending for many people who already have cancer. Treatments are in fact improving
  - cyberax 2y ago
    That's not true. Survival rates in most cancers went up, not only in lung cancers.
    - derektank 2y ago
      It's true that there has been some progress in treating most cancers and particular success in treating some specific cancers e.g. with checkpoint inhibitors. But lung cancer is both one of the most common forms of cancer (it's still third even with the massive decline in smoking) and has a much lower 5 year survival rate than the other most common cancers, breast and prostate. The massive decline in smoking has played an outsized impact on the improvement in reducing both cancer rates and deaths from cancer generally
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lenerdenator 2y ago
Well, let's see. Some drug company or group of investors must think it's potentially profitable to develop into a real treatment. Then they have to move up the trials ladder, from mice to humans and the steps in-between. Then they have to get regulatory approval. Finally, assuming the steps prior didn't fail horribly, they need to set up the manufacturing for the drug. All the meanwhile handing off money to a bunch of people who, more likely than not, never worked for the company in the form of earnings-per-share. So, yeah, a couple decades.
treflop 2y ago
I’m not sure I agree. We now have techniques like immunotherapy for some cancers. Cancer rates still continue to fall. We have a drug now that you can take so you won’t catch HIV, as well as another drug for HIV+ that keeps it at bay. We haven’t found a cure-all. Rather, now we have a lot more treatment options nowadays depending on your specific cancer or illness.
- andkenneth 2y ago
  And as always, when problems get solved, other problems get revealed. We didn't even really know about cancer until life expectancies got to the point where dying in your 30s is a tragedy instead of being fairly normal.
  - xp84 2y ago
    I don’t think dying in your 30s has been normal in the Western world anytime In the last 500 years. Remember all those life expectancy mean statistics were heavily dragged down by the huge infant mortality stats. If your comment was more talking about the Stone Age or something, I apologize for misinterpreting :)
    - radicalbyte 2y ago
      Infant and mother mortality stats.
  - anonym29 2y ago
    The idea that most people more than ~120 years ago died in their 30s or 40s is a popular misconception. LEAB (Life expectancy at birth) used to be in the mid-30s, but this was largely due to a bimodal distribution of deaths: a large number dying during childbirth, infancy, or early childhood, and a lot at more typical old age (60-70, still a bit lower than is common in much of the west today, but you get the idea). If you made it past puberty, there were pretty good odds of you making it to old age.
    - mlyle 2y ago
weaksauce 2y ago
mrna vaccine had big “breakthroughs” during the 80s and 90s and yet it took quite a while for it to be a viable thing. some things take time and some things never pan out past the in a pitri dish stage.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
melling 2y ago
I don’t think we’ve made any progress in Alzheimer’s. Where did you read that we have?
- zdragnar 2y ago
  There have been a fair number of announcements about possible progress, and even several recently related drugs. The research and drugs continue to focus entirely on beta amyloid buildup in the brain: https://www.science.org/content/article/new-alzheimer-s-drugs-create-prescribing-dilemmas-doctors https://www.science.org/content/article/new-alzheimer-s-drug... There's not a shortage of debate on whether they are effective, ought to have gotten any approval, or if beta amyloid buildup is even a cause or contributor to Alzheimer's disease, so whether we've actually made progress remains debatable for the short term until results on these drugs are in.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    Wasn't a lot of the beta amyloid buildup hypothesis based of of results from Marc tessier Levine who left Stanford under a cloud of accusations of results fakery and is now the CEO of the ai startup xaira?
    - ekianjo 2y ago
      Yes it was mostly a bad hypothesis on which the industry wasted billions and 20 years.
  - melling 2y ago
    Well, which is it “great advancements“ or “possible progress “? You’re both saying two different things.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
kemmishtree 2y ago
Robust biomarker monitoring in toilets would lead to a 95% reduction in cancer deaths. Robust biomarker discovery in toilets would let us take care of most of the other 5%. That's the main obvious humanitarian purpose of our project www.molecularReality.com
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  How do I buy an anticancer toilet?
  - esperent 2y ago
    Post I spotted earlier today on reddit: > TIL that scientists at Stanford University have developed a smart toilet that reads your anus like a fingerprint and monitors the health of your poop and pee. The lead researcher said, "We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique." https://old.reddit.com/over18?dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fr%2Ftodayilearned%2Fcomments%2F1gj41tt%2Ftil_that_scientists_at_stanford_university_have%2F https://old.reddit.com/over18?dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit....
    - NemoNobody 2y ago
      I had a tech startup back in the day and I always had a hard time getting people to understand the significance of data and ended up often explaining how incredibly valuable the data is about when we simply take a sh*t is/would be. Most people couldn't seem to grasp that either.
uoaei 2y ago
The missing ingredient that makes it make sense is the profit motive.
Spooky23 2y ago
Two things. If you follow the news closely, but lack specific expertise or knowledge, you develop this nihilistic sense of doom to some degree. The narrative of our age is that everything is in decline. It pulls clicks. The other thing is that cancers are not created equal, not all treatments are evolving quickly. Your loved one may be suffering, and that’s your world. I will say that I lost my beautiful wife a little over a year ago. She had an aggressive cancer, for which the 10-year survival rate was zero. Thanks to the miracle of immunotherapy, the five year survival rate is about 65%. At the same time, my 78 year old aunt successfully fought lung cancer that was a death sentence 20 years ago.
- highwaylights 2y ago
  I’ve nothing to add to the discussion but just wanted to say that, for what it’s worth, I’m terribly sorry for your loss.
  - EQYV 2y ago
    Very much the same from me. I know +1 posts aren’t generally welcome here but I hope dang can forgive it.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Thank you both! I think it’s important to share for a variety of reasons but most importantly to add some humanity to a topic that gets turned into technocrat babble.
dools 2y ago
When my Aunt was diagnosed with MS in the 80s it was a crippling and degenerative ailment. When my brother was diagnosed with MS ~30 years later, it was a nothing burger. He gets an infusion monthly and suffers no significant impact on his quality of life.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  This is great to hear. I had an Aunt that was diagnosed with MS around 40 and by 50 she was in long term care - it's the only place I ever saw her and she had a terrible quality of life, completely incapacitated. I've always had a fear of MS bc of this bc apparently she was completely normal before. Thank you for that comment.
adastra22 2y ago
Blame the FDA. It is near impossible to get these treatments out to patients.
- equasar 2y ago
  Can other countries conduct trials for these treatments at the patient's own risk?
  - 2Gkashmiri 2y ago
    i find this funny. what do you mean "patient's own risk?" that has always been the case. you go for a minor surgery, you sign a waiver. you go to a doctor, they are supposed to give reasonable care. No one can guarantee success. the same with lawyers or drivers or mechanics or technicians. basically anytime you go to someone for assistance, they can't guarantee anything. the person is themselves always responsible for everything.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      With the FDA rules they are not legally allowed to offer such services, however.
      - dahart 2y ago
        Not sure what you’re talking about. In general the FDA does not regulate medical “services” or procedures.
    - dahart 2y ago
      Of course there’s always some risk with any drug or medical procedure. But - obviously - not all risk is equal. Unapproved treatments are riskier because they haven’t been proven effective, and they haven’t been well tested for side effects. There is an uncountably large list of cases throughout history of people willing to sell ineffective and/or actively harmful treatments, which is the whole reason the FDA exists. Look up people who died taking ivermectin for Covid [1], or just pick any ailment and do some research on fake treatments, perhaps cancer for example [2]. The UN says half a million people in Africa alone are being killed every year by fake medicine today, currently [3]. [1] https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/03/14/an-ivermectin-influencer-died-now-his-followers-are-worried-about-their-own-severe-symptoms/ https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/03/14/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven... [3] https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/february-2023/fake-medicines-kill-almost-500000-sub-saharan-africans-year-unodc-report-0 https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/february-2023/fake...
cyberax 2y ago
> people's treatment is not going any better That's not true. It's improving steadily: https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival , and with the newer advances it's going to become even better. Yes, it's not like an exponential Moore's law graph, but there is a steady drumbeat of incremental steps. And they keep reinforcing each other.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  Only for specific sites of cancer. Many others are just as deadly as they have ever been.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - D-Coder 2y ago
    Well, yes, but that's typically how progress works in any field.
narrator 2y ago
Remember Calico and Altos Labs which were moonshot cure longevity companies? After years they emerge out of stealth and all they got is some cancer drugs. The gravitational pull of the billions of dollars to treat cancer patients and extend their lives a few more months eats up all the attention of the biotech world because there is such an astronomical amount of money in it and you'll just have to come up with a new way to kill cells which is relatively easy. So usually when people talk about new cancer drugs it meant that great scientists will make billions wasting their lives barely improving the quality of life for some terminally ill cancer patients and it's just kind of sad, honestly.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Or maybe heroic efforts are being made to solve a very hard but worthwhile problem? You don’t get to decide how long the road is to a complete solution. Just whether it will be worth it incrementally and in the end. You don’t propose any constructive alternative. Life, even just extending life of millions of people a bit, survival rates just a bit, is worth a lot.
  - narrator 2y ago
    Here's your alternative that precisely nobody is going to make any money off of : https://isom.ca/article/targeting-the-mitochondrial-stem-cell-connection-in-cancer-treatment-a-hybrid-orthomolecular-protocol/ https://isom.ca/article/targeting-the-mitochondrial-stem-cel...
wbl 2y ago
HIV has gone from death sentence to completely preventable with a single daily pill or every 6 months injection, and readily treatable to the point where we have geriatric HIV patients. Obesity is now effectively treatable even taking into account compliance. Hep C can be cured entirely with just six months of oral medication rather than a barely tolerable intravenous course that didn't work all that well. These are massive improvements that have changed how hundreds of millions of people are treated and their prognosis. The road to the clinic is long, but there have been very big improvements.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 2y ago
  It seems like stock markets, a lot of bubbles pop, and it's easy to miss the trend .. every 5 years some progress is made.
- DennisP 2y ago
  And stage 4 melanoma used to mean you'd be dead in a year. I know someone who got diagnosed with it almost a decade ago, got three doses of immunotherapy, and is now cancer-free. Doesn't even have to get scans anymore.
  - adamredwoods 2y ago
    Melanoma is the main cancer that responds well to immunotherapy, PD-1 inhibitors. Other solid cancers, not so much, although in combination with other therapies, is seeing some okay results. They recently found some types of rectal cancer to be PD-1 sensitive. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445
ekianjo 2y ago
> great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases (like Alzheimer' There is virtually no new treatment for Alzheimer for 20 years and no progress in understanding its mechanism either.
randcraw 2y ago
Each medical innovation overcomes but one hurdle on a path to a treatment/cure, often revealing new hurdles that weren't visible (or important) until the first hurdle fell. A good example is lipid nanoparticles, which for the first 15 years or more of their existence were horrifically lethal in every hominid, making their potential for delivering transformative genetic or immune cargo into cells impossible. Finally, PEGylation was introduced into their formulation, bypassing the toxic effect they had in precipitating out nearly all of each animal's platelets upon treatment. Within just a few years, LNPs became a very effective way to deliver MRNA vaccines to BILLIONS of human patients, effectively ending the worst of the Covid pandemic. Medical revolutions are like evolutionary punctuated equilibrium -- barriers to advancement are overcome nonuniformly and often incompletely, requiring a lot of continued effort even after a revolution begins. So it shouldn't be surprising that more battles are won than wars. We should celebrate whatever victories we can. Cancer promises to be a war to end all wars.
drawfloat 2y ago
10ish years ago Myleoma was a semi death sentence, it’s now coming close to being treated like a chronic condition. There are definitely improvements happening, but we’ll often miss them because it’s incremental rather than “we developed this cure for lung cancer and it’s no longer a problem” Edit: some of the replies below are pretty bleak “it’s just a few months that’s nothing”. The difference between a 5 year and 15 year life expectancy for a parent being diagnosed with blood cancer around 60 is huge.
- master-lincoln 2y ago
  I am curious: why would it make a difference for a 60 year old if they are a parent and have 5 or 15 years vs not? I would have thought by that age children are long independent...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - popcorncowboy 2y ago
    The difference between your grandkids meeting you or not.
    - steveBK123 2y ago
      Exactly - in my father's case would be difference between dying before all your kids marry vs meeting all your grandkids, helping to watch them.. and seeing them grow up and start going to school.
  - eCa 2y ago
    Plenty of people have kids in their 40s and 50s.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    60+15 => 75, a pretty normal "lived a full life" age. 60+5 => 65, maybe dying before you even retire from your job. Seems significant.
verisimi 2y ago
This all makes sense once you consider health as a business. There is no great interest by business in a cure to this or that. However, an expensive perpetual treatment (lifetime service contract) is far more appealing - the revenue stream is superior. What we call a 'health' industry is a misnomer - it is a sickness industry, like the ministry of defence is really the ministry of attack. If you want to really get cynical, you can consider the possibility that a lot of treatments are not only unnecessary, but actively detrimental to the person receiving the "treatment". The person in future may develop diseases that will then open further revenue streams from what would otherwise be a healthy individual. This would assure a healthy pipeline of future revenue for the pharmaceutical companies. Luckily we have government agencies to manage the pharmaceutical products we are given. Unfortunately, it is something of an open door policy as senior government staff are then given senior positions in pharmaceutical companies. I'm sure it all works out in the end!
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > There is no great interest by business in a cure to this or that Of course there is. Cures make billions. This might be a conspiracy theory stupider than flat Eartherism. It requires not only every Western pharmaceutical company’s collaboration, but also every one in every other country, and also all the public labs, and every world leader and their families to suck it up for the conspiracy’s sake.
  - verisimi 2y ago
    Goldman Sachs analysts agree with me! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-u4cr3fJ0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-u4cr3fJ0 Most people act against their conscience pretty much every day for money, more so in senior positions. That money is a great motivator is not really a conspiracy.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      Go beyond the YouTube video reporting on the report's title and you'll find a thoughtful paper on drug pricing. TL; DR Sick people and governments will pay a lot for cures. > Most people act against their conscience pretty much every day for money, more so in senior positions This isn't about conscience, it's about greed. Cures are great business. Also, again, rich people get cancer. If you want to come up with healthcare conspiracies, don't pick a disease the rich and powerful get.
rsynnott 2y ago
> I really find strange how I've been reading news lines over the past years about great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases (like Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cancers) yet after all that time people's treatment is not going any better. ... I mean I think you are possibly not just paying attention. All sorts of things that were absolute death sentences within recent memory are now very treatable. News articles tend to overhype, of course, but cancer treatment now is a different world to a few decades ago.
gus_massa 2y ago
> I've been reading news lines over the past years about great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases There is a lot of overhype in the news. When they claim that a new 80% improvement in batteries we all know it's a joke a laugh. When there is a similar exaggeration in cancer cures we get sad. The saddest part is that the overhype shadows all the small/local improvements. They are better explained in sibling comments. Medicine is not my area so they give better examples than what I can choose. When I read a new about my area or something close enough, it's fun to try to guess what was the original new before it was badly rewrote by the press and how interesting it is. But when there are lives related to the new, it's not fun to read post with unrealistic promises.
- DennisP 2y ago
  The thing about batteries is that those big discoveries in the lab take a long time to reach the market. By the time they do reach the market, they're just an incremental improvement over all the other big discoveries that are already in production. So we never seem to get a dramatic breakthrough, but what we do get is steady improvement over the course of decades. And that's why we have electric cars now with ranges over 400 miles, while back in 1996 the EV1 had 70 to 100 miles. I think cancer treatments are pretty much the same.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  Ok are you fr? The phone I'm typing this on is superior to the computer in highschool to play video games on and it's my old phone that can't hold a candle to my new phone. The batteries in both devices are both MORE THAN 80% superior to the battery in my first phone. F*ck. Progress does exist - life has got enormously better but people reuse to see it and focus their entire lives on living the same day over and over and wonder why they are unhappy.
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    Mmm... I think we? The problem is that most of the 80% advance in your batteries are small 2-3% advances that never got a huge press cover. The 80% improvement press announcement are the unrealistic ones. PS: My favorite weird quantum anecdote that nobody know and everyone uses was Giant Magnetoresistance. Have you ever read about it? Do you have a device that uses it at your home? Is it weird to have two currents instead of one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance But now the SSD ruined the anecdote :( .
jimbokun 2y ago
> yet after all that time people's treatment is not going any better. What is your basis for this claim?
interludead 2y ago
Yep, breakthroughs get announced, but the real-world impact can feel slow
z3ncyberpunk 2y ago
A lot of it is the case of bad science being popularized and then blindly built upon. This is exampled by the recent redaction of a huge amount of Alzheimer's papers which formed the nucleus of Alzheimer's research. Academia and science are often the largest purveyors of misinformation despite.

by lr0 2y ago

njtransit 2y ago

Why do you think “people’s treatment is not going any better”? As far as I know, cancer outcomes have greatly improved.

bb88 2y ago
It's the articles that decry "Big discovery in X". This could be because the researchers need funding so they will hype the results as much as possible. Then the articles need as much readership so the journalists hype the results as much as possible. Then the people suffering from the disease want as much help as possible so they push the articles/papers to the doctors. On the other hand, it's been my experience that GLP-1 agonsists weren't overhyped, I was completely surprised when my doctor prescribed Mounjaro for weight loss. Even after decades of articles about "NEW WEIGHT LOSS TREATMENT!" (See also phen-phen)
- markus92 2y ago
  It's mostly the PR department of universities that boast about those big discoveries. Researchers themselves usually try to add some nuance to it.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Cancer detection/testing has gotten a lot more attention. Detected early, many victims are still alive after 5 years and considered "cured." But it still gets you in the end. A lot of expense and misery while under medication/chemo/rad/surgical therapy and in the end you are dead just the same.
- fzeroracer 2y ago
  I'm not sure why this matters. In the end we're all going to die, death is inescapable. The ultimate form of your rationalization is that we should simply not treat anything because we die all the same. But for many cancers and other diseases not only has early detection gotten better but so has treatment and prognosis. Treatment isn't nearly as bad to go through and long term survival rates are higher. People can live longer with cancer while still being fully functioning.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  That’s the measurement that a lot of Covid deniers liked to roll out. Death isn’t the only metric. Life is a precious and personal thing. Those years mean wishes fulfilled, graduations and weddings celebrated, life lived.
ekianjo 2y ago
[flagged]
- rowanG077 2y ago
  What else is there? Are you saying immortality or bust?
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    What else is there? Long term remission for example. This is hardly looked at because we don't see any difference.
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      Long term remission is just a few months extra to live. In the end you have people who die quickly and people that live for years. That's why you get averages of a few months extra.
adamredwoods 2y ago
Depends. Early cancer? Yes, outlook is getting better. Metastatic cancer? It's still very bad outcomes. (Personal experience.)

echelon 2y ago

Cancer deaths have been falling since the 90's. Detection and treatments are improving. We don't have a silver bullet because these diseases are so incredibly complicated. "Cancer" is a particular type of disease behavior, but is essentially a broad class of failure states across different types of cells and tissues, with different genetic, metabolic, biochemical, and molecular dysfunctions.

derektank 2y ago
The decline in cancer deaths can almost entirely be explained by the decline in smoking. Getting from 40% of people smoking to 15% was probably the biggest public health victory of the latter half of the 20th century
- bb88 2y ago
  similar arguments have been made about lead and leaded gasoline being made illegal in the 70s.
- bglazer 2y ago
  This is true in the large sense but it obscures that 5 year survival rates have been steadily extending for many people who already have cancer. Treatments are in fact improving
- cyberax 2y ago
  That's not true. Survival rates in most cancers went up, not only in lung cancers.
  - derektank 2y ago
    It's true that there has been some progress in treating most cancers and particular success in treating some specific cancers e.g. with checkpoint inhibitors. But lung cancer is both one of the most common forms of cancer (it's still third even with the massive decline in smoking) and has a much lower 5 year survival rate than the other most common cancers, breast and prostate. The massive decline in smoking has played an outsized impact on the improvement in reducing both cancer rates and deaths from cancer generally

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lenerdenator 2y ago

Well, let's see. Some drug company or group of investors must think it's potentially profitable to develop into a real treatment. Then they have to move up the trials ladder, from mice to humans and the steps in-between. Then they have to get regulatory approval. Finally, assuming the steps prior didn't fail horribly, they need to set up the manufacturing for the drug. All the meanwhile handing off money to a bunch of people who, more likely than not, never worked for the company in the form of earnings-per-share. So, yeah, a couple decades.

treflop 2y ago

I’m not sure I agree. We now have techniques like immunotherapy for some cancers. Cancer rates still continue to fall. We have a drug now that you can take so you won’t catch HIV, as well as another drug for HIV+ that keeps it at bay. We haven’t found a cure-all. Rather, now we have a lot more treatment options nowadays depending on your specific cancer or illness.

andkenneth 2y ago
And as always, when problems get solved, other problems get revealed. We didn't even really know about cancer until life expectancies got to the point where dying in your 30s is a tragedy instead of being fairly normal.
- xp84 2y ago
  I don’t think dying in your 30s has been normal in the Western world anytime In the last 500 years. Remember all those life expectancy mean statistics were heavily dragged down by the huge infant mortality stats. If your comment was more talking about the Stone Age or something, I apologize for misinterpreting :)
  - radicalbyte 2y ago
    Infant and mother mortality stats.
- anonym29 2y ago
  The idea that most people more than ~120 years ago died in their 30s or 40s is a popular misconception. LEAB (Life expectancy at birth) used to be in the mid-30s, but this was largely due to a bimodal distribution of deaths: a large number dying during childbirth, infancy, or early childhood, and a lot at more typical old age (60-70, still a bit lower than is common in much of the west today, but you get the idea). If you made it past puberty, there were pretty good odds of you making it to old age.
  - mlyle 2y ago

weaksauce 2y ago

mrna vaccine had big “breakthroughs” during the 80s and 90s and yet it took quite a while for it to be a viable thing. some things take time and some things never pan out past the in a pitri dish stage.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

melling 2y ago

I don’t think we’ve made any progress in Alzheimer’s. Where did you read that we have?

zdragnar 2y ago
There have been a fair number of announcements about possible progress, and even several recently related drugs. The research and drugs continue to focus entirely on beta amyloid buildup in the brain: https://www.science.org/content/article/new-alzheimer-s-drugs-create-prescribing-dilemmas-doctors https://www.science.org/content/article/new-alzheimer-s-drug... There's not a shortage of debate on whether they are effective, ought to have gotten any approval, or if beta amyloid buildup is even a cause or contributor to Alzheimer's disease, so whether we've actually made progress remains debatable for the short term until results on these drugs are in.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  Wasn't a lot of the beta amyloid buildup hypothesis based of of results from Marc tessier Levine who left Stanford under a cloud of accusations of results fakery and is now the CEO of the ai startup xaira?
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    Yes it was mostly a bad hypothesis on which the industry wasted billions and 20 years.
- melling 2y ago
  Well, which is it “great advancements“ or “possible progress “? You’re both saying two different things.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

kemmishtree 2y ago

Robust biomarker monitoring in toilets would lead to a 95% reduction in cancer deaths. Robust biomarker discovery in toilets would let us take care of most of the other 5%. That's the main obvious humanitarian purpose of our project www.molecularReality.com

8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
How do I buy an anticancer toilet?
- esperent 2y ago
  Post I spotted earlier today on reddit: > TIL that scientists at Stanford University have developed a smart toilet that reads your anus like a fingerprint and monitors the health of your poop and pee. The lead researcher said, "We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique." https://old.reddit.com/over18?dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fr%2Ftodayilearned%2Fcomments%2F1gj41tt%2Ftil_that_scientists_at_stanford_university_have%2F https://old.reddit.com/over18?dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit....
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    I had a tech startup back in the day and I always had a hard time getting people to understand the significance of data and ended up often explaining how incredibly valuable the data is about when we simply take a sh*t is/would be. Most people couldn't seem to grasp that either.

uoaei 2y ago

The missing ingredient that makes it make sense is the profit motive.

Spooky23 2y ago

Two things. If you follow the news closely, but lack specific expertise or knowledge, you develop this nihilistic sense of doom to some degree. The narrative of our age is that everything is in decline. It pulls clicks. The other thing is that cancers are not created equal, not all treatments are evolving quickly. Your loved one may be suffering, and that’s your world. I will say that I lost my beautiful wife a little over a year ago. She had an aggressive cancer, for which the 10-year survival rate was zero. Thanks to the miracle of immunotherapy, the five year survival rate is about 65%. At the same time, my 78 year old aunt successfully fought lung cancer that was a death sentence 20 years ago.

highwaylights 2y ago
I’ve nothing to add to the discussion but just wanted to say that, for what it’s worth, I’m terribly sorry for your loss.
- EQYV 2y ago
  Very much the same from me. I know +1 posts aren’t generally welcome here but I hope dang can forgive it.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Thank you both! I think it’s important to share for a variety of reasons but most importantly to add some humanity to a topic that gets turned into technocrat babble.

dools 2y ago

When my Aunt was diagnosed with MS in the 80s it was a crippling and degenerative ailment. When my brother was diagnosed with MS ~30 years later, it was a nothing burger. He gets an infusion monthly and suffers no significant impact on his quality of life.

NemoNobody 2y ago
This is great to hear. I had an Aunt that was diagnosed with MS around 40 and by 50 she was in long term care - it's the only place I ever saw her and she had a terrible quality of life, completely incapacitated. I've always had a fear of MS bc of this bc apparently she was completely normal before. Thank you for that comment.

adastra22 2y ago

Blame the FDA. It is near impossible to get these treatments out to patients.

equasar 2y ago
Can other countries conduct trials for these treatments at the patient's own risk?
- 2Gkashmiri 2y ago
  i find this funny. what do you mean "patient's own risk?" that has always been the case. you go for a minor surgery, you sign a waiver. you go to a doctor, they are supposed to give reasonable care. No one can guarantee success. the same with lawyers or drivers or mechanics or technicians. basically anytime you go to someone for assistance, they can't guarantee anything. the person is themselves always responsible for everything.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    With the FDA rules they are not legally allowed to offer such services, however.
    - dahart 2y ago
      Not sure what you’re talking about. In general the FDA does not regulate medical “services” or procedures.
  - dahart 2y ago
    Of course there’s always some risk with any drug or medical procedure. But - obviously - not all risk is equal. Unapproved treatments are riskier because they haven’t been proven effective, and they haven’t been well tested for side effects. There is an uncountably large list of cases throughout history of people willing to sell ineffective and/or actively harmful treatments, which is the whole reason the FDA exists. Look up people who died taking ivermectin for Covid [1], or just pick any ailment and do some research on fake treatments, perhaps cancer for example [2]. The UN says half a million people in Africa alone are being killed every year by fake medicine today, currently [3]. [1] https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/03/14/an-ivermectin-influencer-died-now-his-followers-are-worried-about-their-own-severe-symptoms/ https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/03/14/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven... [3] https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/february-2023/fake-medicines-kill-almost-500000-sub-saharan-africans-year-unodc-report-0 https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/february-2023/fake...

cyberax 2y ago

> people's treatment is not going any better That's not true. It's improving steadily: https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival , and with the newer advances it's going to become even better. Yes, it's not like an exponential Moore's law graph, but there is a steady drumbeat of incremental steps. And they keep reinforcing each other.

ekianjo 2y ago
Only for specific sites of cancer. Many others are just as deadly as they have ever been.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- D-Coder 2y ago
  Well, yes, but that's typically how progress works in any field.

narrator 2y ago

Remember Calico and Altos Labs which were moonshot cure longevity companies? After years they emerge out of stealth and all they got is some cancer drugs. The gravitational pull of the billions of dollars to treat cancer patients and extend their lives a few more months eats up all the attention of the biotech world because there is such an astronomical amount of money in it and you'll just have to come up with a new way to kill cells which is relatively easy. So usually when people talk about new cancer drugs it meant that great scientists will make billions wasting their lives barely improving the quality of life for some terminally ill cancer patients and it's just kind of sad, honestly.

Nevermark 2y ago
Or maybe heroic efforts are being made to solve a very hard but worthwhile problem? You don’t get to decide how long the road is to a complete solution. Just whether it will be worth it incrementally and in the end. You don’t propose any constructive alternative. Life, even just extending life of millions of people a bit, survival rates just a bit, is worth a lot.
- narrator 2y ago
  Here's your alternative that precisely nobody is going to make any money off of : https://isom.ca/article/targeting-the-mitochondrial-stem-cell-connection-in-cancer-treatment-a-hybrid-orthomolecular-protocol/ https://isom.ca/article/targeting-the-mitochondrial-stem-cel...

wbl 2y ago

HIV has gone from death sentence to completely preventable with a single daily pill or every 6 months injection, and readily treatable to the point where we have geriatric HIV patients. Obesity is now effectively treatable even taking into account compliance. Hep C can be cured entirely with just six months of oral medication rather than a barely tolerable intravenous course that didn't work all that well. These are massive improvements that have changed how hundreds of millions of people are treated and their prognosis. The road to the clinic is long, but there have been very big improvements.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 2y ago
It seems like stock markets, a lot of bubbles pop, and it's easy to miss the trend .. every 5 years some progress is made.
DennisP 2y ago
And stage 4 melanoma used to mean you'd be dead in a year. I know someone who got diagnosed with it almost a decade ago, got three doses of immunotherapy, and is now cancer-free. Doesn't even have to get scans anymore.
- adamredwoods 2y ago
  Melanoma is the main cancer that responds well to immunotherapy, PD-1 inhibitors. Other solid cancers, not so much, although in combination with other therapies, is seeing some okay results. They recently found some types of rectal cancer to be PD-1 sensitive. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445

ekianjo 2y ago

> great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases (like Alzheimer' There is virtually no new treatment for Alzheimer for 20 years and no progress in understanding its mechanism either.

randcraw 2y ago

Each medical innovation overcomes but one hurdle on a path to a treatment/cure, often revealing new hurdles that weren't visible (or important) until the first hurdle fell. A good example is lipid nanoparticles, which for the first 15 years or more of their existence were horrifically lethal in every hominid, making their potential for delivering transformative genetic or immune cargo into cells impossible. Finally, PEGylation was introduced into their formulation, bypassing the toxic effect they had in precipitating out nearly all of each animal's platelets upon treatment. Within just a few years, LNPs became a very effective way to deliver MRNA vaccines to BILLIONS of human patients, effectively ending the worst of the Covid pandemic. Medical revolutions are like evolutionary punctuated equilibrium -- barriers to advancement are overcome nonuniformly and often incompletely, requiring a lot of continued effort even after a revolution begins. So it shouldn't be surprising that more battles are won than wars. We should celebrate whatever victories we can. Cancer promises to be a war to end all wars.

drawfloat 2y ago

10ish years ago Myleoma was a semi death sentence, it’s now coming close to being treated like a chronic condition. There are definitely improvements happening, but we’ll often miss them because it’s incremental rather than “we developed this cure for lung cancer and it’s no longer a problem” Edit: some of the replies below are pretty bleak “it’s just a few months that’s nothing”. The difference between a 5 year and 15 year life expectancy for a parent being diagnosed with blood cancer around 60 is huge.

master-lincoln 2y ago
I am curious: why would it make a difference for a 60 year old if they are a parent and have 5 or 15 years vs not? I would have thought by that age children are long independent...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- popcorncowboy 2y ago
  The difference between your grandkids meeting you or not.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Exactly - in my father's case would be difference between dying before all your kids marry vs meeting all your grandkids, helping to watch them.. and seeing them grow up and start going to school.
- eCa 2y ago
  Plenty of people have kids in their 40s and 50s.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  60+15 => 75, a pretty normal "lived a full life" age. 60+5 => 65, maybe dying before you even retire from your job. Seems significant.

verisimi 2y ago

This all makes sense once you consider health as a business. There is no great interest by business in a cure to this or that. However, an expensive perpetual treatment (lifetime service contract) is far more appealing - the revenue stream is superior. What we call a 'health' industry is a misnomer - it is a sickness industry, like the ministry of defence is really the ministry of attack. If you want to really get cynical, you can consider the possibility that a lot of treatments are not only unnecessary, but actively detrimental to the person receiving the "treatment". The person in future may develop diseases that will then open further revenue streams from what would otherwise be a healthy individual. This would assure a healthy pipeline of future revenue for the pharmaceutical companies. Luckily we have government agencies to manage the pharmaceutical products we are given. Unfortunately, it is something of an open door policy as senior government staff are then given senior positions in pharmaceutical companies. I'm sure it all works out in the end!

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> There is no great interest by business in a cure to this or that Of course there is. Cures make billions. This might be a conspiracy theory stupider than flat Eartherism. It requires not only every Western pharmaceutical company’s collaboration, but also every one in every other country, and also all the public labs, and every world leader and their families to suck it up for the conspiracy’s sake.
- verisimi 2y ago
  Goldman Sachs analysts agree with me! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-u4cr3fJ0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-u4cr3fJ0 Most people act against their conscience pretty much every day for money, more so in senior positions. That money is a great motivator is not really a conspiracy.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    Go beyond the YouTube video reporting on the report's title and you'll find a thoughtful paper on drug pricing. TL; DR Sick people and governments will pay a lot for cures. > Most people act against their conscience pretty much every day for money, more so in senior positions This isn't about conscience, it's about greed. Cures are great business. Also, again, rich people get cancer. If you want to come up with healthcare conspiracies, don't pick a disease the rich and powerful get.

rsynnott 2y ago

> I really find strange how I've been reading news lines over the past years about great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases (like Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cancers) yet after all that time people's treatment is not going any better. ... I mean I think you are possibly not just paying attention. All sorts of things that were absolute death sentences within recent memory are now very treatable. News articles tend to overhype, of course, but cancer treatment now is a different world to a few decades ago.

gus_massa 2y ago

> I've been reading news lines over the past years about great advancements in many incurable and chronic diseases There is a lot of overhype in the news. When they claim that a new 80% improvement in batteries we all know it's a joke a laugh. When there is a similar exaggeration in cancer cures we get sad. The saddest part is that the overhype shadows all the small/local improvements. They are better explained in sibling comments. Medicine is not my area so they give better examples than what I can choose. When I read a new about my area or something close enough, it's fun to try to guess what was the original new before it was badly rewrote by the press and how interesting it is. But when there are lives related to the new, it's not fun to read post with unrealistic promises.

DennisP 2y ago
The thing about batteries is that those big discoveries in the lab take a long time to reach the market. By the time they do reach the market, they're just an incremental improvement over all the other big discoveries that are already in production. So we never seem to get a dramatic breakthrough, but what we do get is steady improvement over the course of decades. And that's why we have electric cars now with ranges over 400 miles, while back in 1996 the EV1 had 70 to 100 miles. I think cancer treatments are pretty much the same.
NemoNobody 2y ago
Ok are you fr? The phone I'm typing this on is superior to the computer in highschool to play video games on and it's my old phone that can't hold a candle to my new phone. The batteries in both devices are both MORE THAN 80% superior to the battery in my first phone. F*ck. Progress does exist - life has got enormously better but people reuse to see it and focus their entire lives on living the same day over and over and wonder why they are unhappy.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  Mmm... I think we? The problem is that most of the 80% advance in your batteries are small 2-3% advances that never got a huge press cover. The 80% improvement press announcement are the unrealistic ones. PS: My favorite weird quantum anecdote that nobody know and everyone uses was Giant Magnetoresistance. Have you ever read about it? Do you have a device that uses it at your home? Is it weird to have two currents instead of one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance But now the SSD ruined the anecdote :( .

jimbokun 2y ago

> yet after all that time people's treatment is not going any better. What is your basis for this claim?

interludead 2y ago

Yep, breakthroughs get announced, but the real-world impact can feel slow

z3ncyberpunk 2y ago

A lot of it is the case of bad science being popularized and then blindly built upon. This is exampled by the recent redaction of a huge amount of Alzheimer's papers which formed the nucleus of Alzheimer's research. Academia and science are often the largest purveyors of misinformation despite.