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Scott Alexander (Slatestarcodex) had a post about this earlier this month: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-kn
by simulate 8y ago
Scott Alexander (Slatestarcodex) had a post about this earlier this month:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-mo...
The gist of the post was that cancer rates since 1990 have gone down primarily because smoking has declined, not because cancer treatment has improved.
- iooi 8y agoWhich isn't related to cancer death rates, which is the proportion of people who die from cancer out of the population of people that have cancer.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 8y agoIf you assume really old people don't have higher death rates, I suppose.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- simulate 8y agoBoth the Slatestarcodex article and the links you provided in your comment use deaths per 100,000. In fact, your article reaches a similar conclusion to Scott Alexander, that mortality is declining mainly because of smoking declining.
- losvedir 8y agoIt touches on that, too. It's also a hard metric to work with because we're getting better at _detecting_ cancers, including more benign and earlier stage ones. I believe the SSC post found that most of the improvement in cancer mortality was more an artifact of detection than actual improvements in care. i.e.: if you look _only_ at equivalent Stage 4 cancers, then the death rate from there hasn't changed much over time.