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| Smoking cause cancer and rates |
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Smoking cause cancer and rates
Author: Alaskalink, Member |
More Americans than ever before are surviving cancer and rates in general are falling, mostly because fewer people are smoking,
the American Cancer Society reported on Wednesday.
The group predicts that 1.372 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in 2005 and 570,280 will die of it.
This does not include a million cases of two not very threatening forms of skin cancer called basal and squamous cell carcinoma.
This compares to 1.368 million cases in 2004 and 563,700 deaths.
Overall numbers are up from 2005 because the population is growing in size and growing older, the group said,
noting that 76 percent of cancer cases are diagnosed in people over the age of 55.
"When deaths are aggregated by age, cancer has surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death for persons
younger than 85 since 1999," the group's 2005 report on cancer reads, informs Reuters.
The news is contained in the American Cancer Society's annual statistical report, released yesterday.
In 2002, the most recent year for which information is available, 476,009 Americans younger than 85 died of cancer
compared with 450,637 who died of heart disease.
That trend began in 1999, said Ahmedin Jemal, a cancer-society epidemiologist and main author of the report.
Those younger than 85 comprise 98.4 percent of the population, said Dr. Eric Feuer,
chief of statistical research for the National Cancer Institute who also worked on the report.
That means that only the very oldest Americans continue to die of heart disease more often than of cancer,
a trend that is expected to reverse by 2018, said Dr. Harmon Eyre, the cancer society's chief medical officer.
One-third of all cancers are related to smoking, and an additional third are related to obesity, poor diets and lack of exercise,
all factors that also contribute to heart disease, write the Seattle Times.
Smoking among adults plummeted between 1965 and 2000, from 42 percent to 22 percent.
Federal goals are to cut the rate to 12 percent by 2010.
People with heart disease also have benefited from better surgical techniques and devices and from
better drugs to treat heart problems and control factors such as high blood pressure, Eyre said.
Cancer-death rates have declined about 1 percent a year since 1999, thanks to earlier detection,
prevention efforts and better treatments, experts said.
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