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The variation among geographic locations is interesting. On the other hand the rise in the rate of colorectal cancer in Japan may simply be due to a rise in can
by fspeech 12y ago
The variation among geographic locations is interesting. On the other hand the rise in the rate of colorectal cancer in Japan may simply be due to a rise in cancer screening. Do Japanese die more often from colorectal cancers? For an example of why this is relevant, over 80% of men in their eighties may have prostate cancer yet the lifetime risk of dying from it is only 3% for a 50 year old man in the US (see http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/2/278.full http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/2/278.full ). So if we improve screening of prostate cancer we may find a lot more cases even though men's risk of dying from it is unchanged.
- fspeech 12y ago"A recent autopsy study reported on 314 African American and 211 Caucasian (sic) men aged 20–80 years who died of trauma in Detroit, USA. Microscopic evaluation in each case was based on 10–14 whole-mount step sections that were 2–3 mm thick.4 This study demonstrated a high prevalence of prostate cancer that increased progressively with advancing age and was similar at all ages in African American compared with Caucasian men (around 10%, 30%, 40%, 45%, 70% and 80% in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th decades, respectively). When this ubiquity of microscopic prostate cancer is placed in the context of lifetime risks of clinical or fatal prostate cancer (about 10% and 3%, respectively for a man aged 50 years in the USA),5 these data indicate that local or distal progression of early cancer is far from inevitable within a man's lifetime. Put another way, only a minority of prostate tumours are highly aggressive and life-threatening, while the majority are slow-growing and indolent."