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Medicine

The Medical Revolutions That Prevented Millions of Cancer Deaths (vox.com) 45

Posted by EditorDavid from the good-news dept.
Vox publishes a story about "the quiet revolutions that have prevented millions of cancer deaths....

"The age-adjusted death rate in the US for cancer has declined by about a third since 1991, meaning people of a given age have about a third lower risk of dying from cancer than people of the same age more than three decades ago... " The dramatic bend in the curve of cancer deaths didn't happen by accident — it's the compound interest of three revolutions. While anti-smoking policy has been the single biggest lifesaver, other interventions have helped reduce people's cancer risk. One of the biggest successes is the HPV vaccine. A study last year found that death rates of cervical cancer — which can be caused by HPV infections — in US women ages 20-39 had dropped 62 percent from 2012 to 2021, thanks largely to the spread of the vaccine. Other cancers have been linked to infections, and there is strong research indicating that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing cancer incidence.

The next revolution is better and earlier screening. It's generally true that the earlier cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival... According to one study, incidences of late-stage colorectal cancer in Americans over 50 declined by a third between 2000 and 2010 in large part because rates of colonoscopies almost tripled in that same time period. And newer screening methods, often employing AI or using blood-based tests, could make preliminary screening simpler, less invasive and therefore more readily available. If 20th-century screening was about finding physical evidence of something wrong — the lump in the breast — 21st-century screening aims to find cancer before symptoms even arise.

Most exciting of all are frontier developments in treating cancer... From drugs like lenalidomide and bortezomib in the 2000s, which helped double median myeloma survival, to the spread of monoclonal antibodies, real breakthroughs in treatments have meaningfully extended people's lives — not just by months, but years. Perhaps the most promising development is CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than attempting to kill the cancer directly, immunotherapies turn a patient's own T-cells into guided missiles. In a recent study of 97 patients with multiple myeloma, many of whom were facing hospice care, a third of those who received CAR-T therapy had no detectable cancer five years later. It was the kind of result that doctors rarely see.
The article begins with some recent quotes from Jon Gluck, who was told after a cancer diagnosis that he had as little as 18 months left to live — 22 years ago...

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The Medical Revolutions That Prevented Millions of Cancer Deaths

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  • Admittedly anecdotal... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Surak_Prime ( 160061 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @08:30AM (#65437219)

    ...but the freaking doctors that did my colonoscopies over the last year did a job they *could* have done in a single procedure in three separate procedures in part because the insurance companies changed guidelines for how much anesthetic can be given for a single procedure. In other words, doing it in 3 was the only way they could keep me from waking up in the middle of it, and there was no *medically* necessitated reason for that. Like I said, anecdotal, but if it is in any way typical, those statistics on the number of those procedures may be skewed.

  • Smoking (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We, Gen-X, spent a lot of time and effort to get people to quit smoking and then all you fucking morons start vaping. At least the joke will be on you.

  • My 67y dad was (almost accidentally - he was being scanned for something else) diagnosed with an advanced stage of multiple myeloma in 2003 and was given a single-digit% chance to live, at most 6 mos.
    Figuring he had little to lose, he signed up for experimental stem-cell replacement therapy at the U of MN hospital which was expected to increase his lifespan from 6mo to 2-3yr.

    It was arduous but by 2006 he was pronounced *entirely cancer free* living another 12 years before finally succumbing to pneumonia (mo

    • My 67y dad was (almost accidentally - he was being scanned for something else) diagnosed with an advanced stage of multiple myeloma in 2003 and was given a single-digit% chance to live, at most 6 mos. Figuring he had little to lose, he signed up for experimental stem-cell replacement therapy at the U of MN hospital which was expected to increase his lifespan from 6mo to 2-3yr.

      It was arduous but by 2006 he was pronounced *entirely cancer free* living another 12 years before finally succumbing to pneumonia (more or less the result of a severe stroke a few years before).

      As I see, today that same condition/age I see survival rates now north of 60%.

      Advances in cancer treatments have really been remarkable.

      I'm thinking you mean a bone marrow transplant. (Which is a form of stem cell transplant.) Admittedly when my dad was dying of renal cell carcinoma around the same time, I was reading there was an experimental program to treat that with a bone marrow transplant as well. The results of that were pretty much 20% of the time it cured it, 60% of the time it did nothing and 20% of the time it killed the patient in about 2 weeks. Admittedly we didn't go any further looking into it. (Hopefully the odds a better th

      • Yep, that's correct. And yeah, that's about what we were told, although I don't recall the 'x% death sooner' - my dad could have kept that to himself. I recall being told they thought it would have a 1/3 chance of extending his life to a handful of years. We were extraordinarily fortunate.

  • Look, I’m thrilled Vox can read an SEER plot and notice that smoking, screening, and HPV vaccines matter (slow clap). But before we crown Big Tobacco lawsuits and Gardasil as the sole saviors of humankind, can we maybe glance at, oh, the last half-century of environmental regulation?

    What about the asbestos bans that cratered mesothelioma in post’70s construction cohorts? 84% risk reduction -- ring a bell? What about Chile and Taiwan slashing arsenic in drinking water and watching bladder and lungcancer mortality do a Wile E.Coyote cliff plunge two decades later? Or the Mercury & AirToxics Standards that took nickel, chromium, and friends down by 80% -- something the EPA’s own Section 812 analysis credits with thousands of avoided cancer deaths?

    But sure, let’s keep peddling the tidy narrative that medical tech alone bent the mortality curve. Those radon-mitigation building codes? Irrelevant. Beryllium and benzene exposure limits? Yawn. Apparently if the benefit isn’t measured in ninefigure pharma revenue or a primetime Super Bowl ad, it doesn’t make the Vox word count.

    Pro-tip: pathology doesn’t care whether the carcinogen came from Marlboro Country or your municipal tap. Policy matters, and not just the ones that poll well on Twitter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      It's even there in the "Most of exciting of all" phrasing, describing frontier tech.

      None of that tech is as exciting as public health and prevention, in my view. So I fully agree with you on the importance of environmental regs that have driven down prevalence rates for key cancers.

  • The results would be even better with single-payer Medicare for All.
    • That's a tad off-topic, but it's a serious claim and deserves a bit of attention. There are a number of countries that already have single-payer medicine for all and have done so for a fairly long time. How do their cancer rates, both in terms of cases and survival, compare with those of the USA? That's a serious question, because you're claiming that that system is better than what the US has now.

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