“Easy” is of course relative, but what other medical conditions are like diabetes where the patient can easily take some kind of medication on a regular basis to manage it, yet if they didn’t have the medication the condition would likely be fatal. Of course, diabetes has complications and can still shorten lifespans even when well managed, but many diabetics lead a pretty normal life without their condition being too imposing. I was trying to think of other organ issues (thyroid? gallbladder?), but I couldn’t think of any that would be fatal if not for easily administered medicine.
Lots of infectious diseases. Pneumonia, HIV, leprosy, etc.
Also how do you define ‘fatal’?
So the life expectancy gap of men diagnosed with type 2 diabetes is 8 years between 2 groups. One that smokes, has an A1C of 10%, bad cholesterol, high blood pressure.
The other group has all the right health parameters.
But that is four parameters, and I’d assume smoking makes up a huge % of that gap since the life expectancy gap from smoking alone is something like 10 years. So according to that, the life expectancy gap from the A1C alone is probably under 5 years.
So again, I don’t know how you define fatal. It is one thing to die of pneumonia at age 16. It is another to die of untreated diabetes at age 72, when treated diabetes would’ve seen you live to 76 or so. After a while, you are just dying of complications of old age.
Unless you meant type 1 diabetes, in which case ignore my post.
Also some cancers can be treated well now while those same cancers were highly fatal in the past. But I can’t remember the names right now. Some pediatric cancers used to be highly fatal but now have much better survival rates.
Also some nutritional deficiencies. Scurvy, beri beri, etc
Hypertension.
Cholera.
Caught early, adequate supply of clean drinking water alone will cure.
Even in the worst cases oral rehydration or intravenous fluids and electrolytes will reduce fatalities by 99%.
Thyroid disease can indeed be fatal if not treated, although that’s very unusual in the developed world.
I’m mostly wondering about medical conditions which don’t actually have a cure. So things like cancer, flu, etc. aren’t really what I was initially wondering about, since people don’t typically live with those conditions for years and years. I’m more wondering about medical conditions which would greatly shorten someone’s life, but with regular medication the person can live a typical lifespan without too much inconvenience. So hypertension mentioned above would probably be more in line with what I was wondering. With proper medication, the health effects of hypertension can be greatly minimized. And while under medication, the person can still have a pretty typical quality of life.
I think HIV fits the conditions. Undetectable people don’t have a perfect life, but it’s pretty manageable.
Chronic myeloid leukemia comes immediately to mind. I’m sure there are others.
Before antibiotics people used to live with diseases like TB for years.
As far as hypertension, treating the disease adds 2-11 months in quality adjusted life years.
Thats not nothing, but it also means that an untreated hypertensive may die on average at 78 while the treated one dies at 79.
Which again, where do you draw the line regarding ‘fatal’? Is someone dying at 79 years and 6 months being treated for a fatal disease, when the untreated person only lived for 79 years and 2 months suffering an early death? Many medical treatments nowadays are more designed to slightly slow the progression of diseases of old age. I’m not sure if that’s really ‘saving lives’ in the most objective meaning of the term.
Sanitation, clean drinking water, vaccinations, antibiotics, appendectomies, seat belts, air bags, narcan, etc. save lives. Medications that cause people to live to 82 instead of 81 arguably are just delaying death from old age for a year. I believe curing all forms of cancer 100% would only increase human life expectancy by about 3 years.
IMO most medical interventions that actually save lives (meaning they add meaningful years to life expectancy) usually come down to ways to combat deaths from infections, malnutrition, poisoning and physical trauma. Much of the rest of medicine seems devoted to combatting diseases of aging.
CML, which I just posted about, is exactly what you seem to want. It’s treated with targeted therapy, i.e. certain drugs (about 5 or 6 different ones, depending on the specific mutation that causes it) which keep it under control. It’s fatal without treatment, but people live for years with treatment. The same drugs also treat certain cancers of the GI tract.
Until the late 1990s, CML was a death sentence without a bone marrow transplant, a procedure that still kills a high percentage of its patients outright. Even with treatment, these patients are still chronically ill and the meds have unpleasant side effects of their own.
Treatments for hypertension have also improved dramatically over time. I believe that the reduction in smoking has done more to reduce the M&M from this than any other single factor.
M&M = morbidity and mortality
Nutritional diseases can be cured or prevented with an adequate diet.
As for cancers, are you thinking specifically of Hodgkin’s disease or acute lymphoblastic leukemia, both of which used to be essentially 100% fatal but now have cure rates over 90%? Most types of testicular cancer are also highly curable (with probably the most brutal chemotherapy regimens on the planet) but that wasn’t previously the case.
Nutritional deficiencies can be treated, but it generally wasn’t until the early 20th century that we understood what vitamins were, and what diseases they caused when people were deficient. A person in the 19th century didn’t really know what caused or treated scurvy or beri beri. For much of human history, various vitamin/mineral deficiencies would qualify as chronic medical conditions that can easily be treated but would otherwise be fatal. Millions of sailors died from scurvy, and now it is very easy to treat.
I’m not sure what cancers I’m thinking about honestly. CML sounds like one of the cancers, but there are hundreds of cancers and I am not sure which ones have undergone major advances in treatment in the last few decades.
The guy from whom I bought my house had had cancer for 11 years at that point (some sort of lymphoma but that’s all I know). It’s one of the reasons the house is kind of weird (no doors in places which would normally have one, a door in the middle of the hallway): he’d used his Good Times to adapt it for the Bad Times. As time went on and treatment improved he’d eventually gotten to the point where the cancer was considered a chronified condition; the Bad Times didn’t even come any more. Since he had been granted full disability/retirement and been told this wasn’t reversable (the law simply hasn’t caught up with the science yet), he was moving to a residence close to his sister’s place so he’d have more stuff to do than mop around the flat and meet his friends for a beer on Saturdays.
The treatment is not medication but transfusions: people with acute thalasemia or with hemophilia get regular transfusions without which they’d die.
Still do, in some places. It’s one of the things for which subsaharian inmigrants to Spain get regularly checked, after our medics realized that a noticeable amount weren’t just “positive for tuberculine” (which the immense majority of Spain is), they were actually sick. Many of them haven’t seen a doctor in their life; imagine the shock and fear when someone tries to take X-Rays or a blood sample. Social Services and the hospitals themselves are desperate for interpreters / advocates for these patients.
More of what I’m thinking are the things which would be quickly fatal if left untreated. Just cutting a few months off an average lifespan wouldn’t really be what I’m thinking (scratching off hypertension). I’m wondering about conditions which would probably be fatal in the short term, but with medication the person could live close to a traditional lifespan without undue effort. So far I would say the list of conditions would be these :
- Type 1 diabetes
- HIV
- CML
Of those, diabetes seems way easier to manage. The other two seem like you’d have to go to the doctor a lot and take a cocktail of drugs depending on your current state. That’s probably at the edge of what I would consider “easy”. Anything more complicated (like dialysis) would significantly impact your quality of life.
In addition to the above, certain types of thyroid malfunction can be fatal but are now treatable.
Several auto-immune conditions that can be fatal can be treated these days.
Heart disease that responds to pacemakers or implantable defibrillators.
Has asthma seriously not been mentioned yet?
Not always fatal, but Pernicious Anemia is pretty bad, yet easily controlled with vitamin B. I was diagnosed with it at the same time I was diagnosed with T1 diabetes, and pretty much took it as ‘ok, I need to take my vitamins every day.’
It wasn’t until the old dude on Downton Abbey thought he was dying of it that I thought to look it up and realized how serious it could be. Who knew?!?