Friday, May 8, 2009

Why did breast cancer death rate decline after 1986 but prostate cancer death rate declined after 1994

Why did breast cancer death rate decline after 1986 but prostate cancer death rate declined after 1994?
Did they work harder so more women would survive breast cancer?? Didn't they work hard at all to decrease the prostate cancer death rate??
Other - Society & Culture - 2 Answers
Random Answers, Critics, Comments, Opinions :
1 :
Look on TV. You will probably see like 10 commercials for breast cancer if you watch for a few hours. You might see one that briefly mentions that it helps prostate health (but along with other things) if you watch TV for a whole 24 hours
2 :
The reason that the death rate initially rose for prostate cancer, after 1986, was that that was when PSA testing was introduced and became widely available (1986-1988). That led to a higher incidence of the disease (it was found more). So there were more death certificates with prostate cancer as the cause, because the doctors easily knew the deceased had it. In some cases, the man didn't even die from prostate cancer, but since he had been screened and diagnosed, that went down as cause of death. Or, as the National Cancer Institute puts it: "Cause-of-death misclassification has also been studied as a possible explanation for changes in prostate cancer mortality. A relatively fixed rate was found at which individuals who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer are mislabeled as dying from prostate cancer. As such, the substantial increase in prostate cancer diagnoses in the late 1980s and early 1990s would then explain the increased rate of prostate cancer death during those years. As the rate of prostate cancer diagnosis fell in the early 1990s, this reduced rate of mislabeling death due to prostate cancer would fall, as would the overall rate of prostate cancer death" http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/screening/prostate/HealthProfessional/allpages You are mistaken if you think that statistics have improved for breast cancer patients more than prostate cancer patients. According to the American Cancer Society: For men diagnosed 1975-77, the 5 year survival rate for prostate cancer was 69%. 10 years later, it was 76%, and by the 1996-2004 time period it was 99%. There were increases and decreases in the survival rate during those years, but the survival rate has been increasing steadily since 2001. For breast cancer, in 1975-77, the 5 year survival rate was a little better than for prostate: 75%. Ten years later, it had improved only a bit, to 79%. And by the 1996-2004 time period, it fell significantly behind that of prostate cancer, at 89%. So over about 30 years, we prostate cancer patients went from a 69% survival rate to 99%, while women went from 75% to 89%.

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