The rate of people that are being diagnosed or have died by cancer in the United States is stable or decreasing for both men and women, according to a new report.
“For the main cancers, it’s really pretty much good news, incidence and mortality is decreasing,” said Recinda Sherman, one of the authors of the new study, from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) in Springfield, Illinois.
Sherman added that the study can provide a clear guidance in where to concentrate resources to educate the public. For example, the scientist said triple-negative breast cancer, which is the most aggressive form, is about 13 percent of breast cancers for all women. The percentage increases to approximately 23 percent of breast cancers among black women.
As triple-negative breast cancer is very rarely discovered by mammography, she explained there may be chances to target black women with messaging regarding that specific type of breast cancer.
One important conclusion of the new report is that for the first time it divides breast cancer into specific groups based on the disease responds to hormones, said,
Speaking with Reuters, Ahmedin Jemal, vice president of surveillance and health service research at the American Cancer Society (ACS), the type of breast cancer largely gives the direction on of the treatment approach that doctors will take.
The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is part of a sequence of annual reports on cancer carried out since 1998 by the NAACCR, the ACS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute.
The group found decreases over the past two decades in the number of new cases for some of the major cancers diagnosed among men, like,lung, prostate ,stomach, colon, brain and throat cancers. There were also declines in the rates of ovary, colon, oral, cervix and stomach cancers among women.
In total, cancer diagnoses dropped by 1.8 percent each year between 2007 and 2011 among men, and remained at the same level among women.
Cancer diagnosis rates among children continue to increase at around 0.8 percent in every year over the last decade, a worrying trend which has remained constant since 1992.
However, overall death rates from cancer declined, among both children and adults. There are, tough, some bad news. For example, liver cancers are increasing, likely due to a raise in hepatitis C infections that goes back more than ten years.
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