Cancer Rates in US on the Slide

Cancer death rates in the US are continuing to drop, falling by 1.8% per year in men and 1.6% per in women between 2004 and 2008, said a report.

More than a million deaths in total may have been prevented owing to advancements in cancer treatment, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report on cancer statistics.

This year, the cancer group projects 1.6 million people will be newly diagnosed with cancer and a little more than half a million will die from it, the report said.

“The big news this year is that cancer deaths are still going down,” said Dr Raymond DuBois, provost and executive vice president at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

DuBois said that while the rate of decline is small, it is significant because it has continued to fall each year for the past 10 years of available data.

Death rates fell in all four of the most common cancers, lung, colon, breast and prostate, with lung cancer accounting for nearly 40% of the total drop in men and breast cancer accounting for 34%t of the total decline in women.