Cancer survival up … by a little
6/5/2004 WASHINGTON DC The NCI, ACS, and CDC More Americans are surviving cancer for five years or more and deaths from cancer overall are steadily declining, according to the latest annual report on cancer published Thursday in the journal Cancer. For the first time, fewer women are being diagnosed with lung cancer, the joint report from the American Cancer Society, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Cancer Institute, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries finds. Not everyone is reaping the gains: Minorities still are more likely than whites to die from cancer, says the report. Cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States behind heart disease. This year 1.368 million Americans will learn they have cancer and 563,700 will die of it. The “Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2001” finds that cancer rates dropped 0.5 percent per year from 1991 to 2001, while death rates from all cancers combined dropped 1.1 percent per year from 1993 to 2001.This is due to better prevention, screening that catches cancer early enough to treat it and better therapies. Most striking in this latest tally is what’s happening with the No. 1 cancer killer: Rates of female lung cancer diagnoses have declined about 2 percent a year since 1998, years after men began a similar improvement. Smoking became common among men long before women, and the resulting lung cancer consequently struck men sooner. Lung cancer remains the nation’s top-killing malignancy [...]