When i do research on cancer alot of the info i see says that if you catch it in stage I then you have over a 90% survival rate for virtually all forms of cancer. The only problem is some cancers like lung or stomach cancer are hard to detect until they reach stage III or so.
So assuming that in the next 20 years all cancers can be detected at stage I with convenient testing methods, will cancer still be a deadly disease or will you just excise the cancerious tissues at stage I and go on with your life?
I’m not sure how you get over the problem of detecting them that early. It’s hard to do and seems to require luck as much as anything else. Some forms are much easier to catch and to treat than others. (I have a friend who just finished a bout with Hodgkin’s Disease. They caught it early so there was about a 90-95% survival rate, he’s 21 and the chances are very slim that it’ll ever be a problem for him again.) But that still means a chunk of the people who have it don’t survive even if it’s found out early. You can’t just exercise the tissue with some cancers since they can spread to other places.
That’s a pretty big assumption, especially since some of the deadliest cancers (gastric, ovarian, pancreatic) are virtually undetectable by convenient testing until they have progressed waaaaay past the “easily treatable” stage.
And some varieties of cancer are pretty untreatable even in the early stages.
So yes, cancer is generally as deadly as its made out to be.
I may be misinformed, but I believe the ‘survival rate’ means the ‘5 year survival rate.’ A survival rate of 90% doesn’t mean that any of those people lived a normal life span. It doesn’t mean that any of those people are cured. It just means that 90% lived for at least 5 years. My first wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. We went through all of the treatments and she lived for more than 5 years. The statistics say she is a survivor. But she still died at age 43. Cancer is still mostly fatal. Very few cases of cancers are cured.
The Green Feather writes:
> I may be misinformed, but I believe the ‘survival rate’ means the ‘5 year
> survival rate.’
Not entirely true. In many cases, the survival rate is given as the 20-year survival rate:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/Healthology/HS_cancer_survival021011.html
There isn’t any single answer to the question in the OP. In some cases, the survival rate is very good, while in others it’s very bad.
Isn’t that the definition of “Stage 1” - highly treatable, very good chances for recovery? How do you catch every cancer when it’s still asymptomatic? Annual brain biopsies to check for tumors? Geez, it’s gonna suck to go to the doctor then - give a sample of kidney, lung, liver, spleen, lymph node, brain, bone . . . Christ!
It’s now becoming apparent, for example, that the easy blood test for prostate cancer (the Prostate-Specific Antigen or PSA test) may not have nearly the predictive value that it was thought to have. The physical exam of the prostate is helpful but that certainly can’t catch every cancer. And this is with one of the most common, and treatable, cancers.
The question really hangs on pretty ridiculous assumptions - it makes it not really answerable.
Cancer is not a monolithic thing. The question, as phrased, is like asking “are viruses and bacteria deadly?”
My father died of a form of leukemia that is untreatable and inevitably fatal in about 2 years (he made it 22 months from diagnosis).
My mother, on the other hand, died of a ruptured bowel caused by an obstructive tumor. If she’d had the sense to go to a doctor, she might still be alive.
The survivability threshold for cancer is “metastasis,” when it spreads to something that speeds it to other parts of the body (like the bloodstream or lymph nodes). Once it hits this stage, the “90% curable” bit becomes inoperative.
Also, cancer is rarely “cured.” It gets treated and goes into remission and stops bothering you for a while, but then comes back, bigger and nastier.
Detection is pretty tricky. My mother’s mammogram looked pretty clean, except for a benign-looking cyst that later turned out to be something much worse.
Semi-funny story: My grandmother, about five years before she died, was at the track one afternoon when a thief (fleeing the police) knocked her to the ground. The cops wanted her to go to the hospital, but she wouldn’t. The cop said “We just need to make sure there’s nothing wrong with you.”
Her reply was priceless: “Young man, I am 85 years old. I can pretty definitely assure you that ‘something’ is wrong with me!” And she went back to the betting window.
Cancer is deadly and traumatic, but as far as I’m concerned, it should be a pretty low priority for medical research.
The deadliness of cancer is always proportional to the total population, and barring some environmental disaster, it is always a small proportion.
Not so for viruses and bacteria. They have the potential to reach epidemic proportions.
Cancer is certainly a threat to individuals, just like car accidents, but not a threat to mankind.
Erm, except for those cases where cancer is caused environmentally (chemicals in foods, sun rays, smoking, etc)… in those cases, yes, cancer certainly is a large scale threat.
Naturally occouring? OK, I agree with you there - it sucks, but it is one of a handful of the ways we eventually die. I’m not even terribly sure that trying to keep everyone alive as long as technically possible is all that brilliant of an idea. But as far as studying what causes cancer, and how to treat it when caught at a young age, it is certainly as important as, say, increasing car safety.
Maybe a “cure for cancer” (no such thing, cancers are diverse, but let’s assume a series of discoveries are made for the more serious cancers) would save a lot of lives - not as much as malaria would, for instance, but something to work for.
Krokodil writes:
> Also, cancer is rarely “cured.” It gets treated and goes into remission and
> stops bothering you for a while, but then comes back, bigger and nastier.
Not quite. In some cases after the tumor is removed, the radiation and/or chemotherapy has been done, and there has been several years of check-ups (blood test, CAT scans, X rays, or whatever), the doctor will say, “You’ve made it through O.K. Eventually you’re going to die, just like we’re all going to die, but there’s no more chance of you dying of cancer than any random person.”