Washington – The number of Americans who died of cancer has dropped for a second consecutive year, marking a milestone in the war on cancer, officials said Wednesday.
More than 3,000 fewer Americans died of cancer in 2004 than in 2003, according to data analyzed by the American Cancer Society, indicating that a much smaller decline in cancer deaths a year earlier was probably not a fluke but instead marked the start of a trend.
“It’s very exciting,” said Ahmedin Jemal, a cancer epidemiologist who prepared the report. “I think it’s a turning point in our efforts to reduce the number of people dying from cancer. It’s very good news.”
The trend was driven by drops in deaths from three of the four major forms of cancer – breast, prostate and colorectal – and a decline in deaths among men from the fourth, lung cancer. It was caused by a combination of factors, including a decline in cigarette smoking among men; wider screening of men and women for colon, prostate and breast cancer; and better treatments, Jemal and others said.
“There’s a lot of good news in this report,” said Linda Pickle of the National Cancer Institute. “We hope that it’s the beginning of a long-term downward trend and that we’ve finally turned the corner.”
President Bush lauded the news during a visit to the National Institutes of Health to attend a roundtable discussion with cancer experts.
“Progress is being made,” Bush said. “We’re spending about $28.6 billion here at the NIH, which was doubled from 15 years ago.”
Jemal and others noted that while the number of Americans being diagnosed with cancer also appears to have plateaued, more than 1.4 million Americans will still find out they have a form of the disease this year and about 559,000 will die, keeping cancer the second-leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease.
The NIH estimates direct medical costs for cancer last year were $78.2 billion.
“We clearly still have a long way to go,” Jemal said.
The death rate from cancer has been dropping by about 1 percent a year since 1991, but the total number of deaths continued to rise because the growth of the overall population and the number of elderly outpaced falling death rates.
Between 2002 and 2003, the number of cancer deaths dipped for the first time since officials started tracking data from death certificates in 1930, dropping by 369 deaths. But that number, reported last year, was so small that officials could not be sure it wasn’t an aberration.
When Jemal and his colleagues examined the latest data from 2004, they found the rate dropped by more than 2 percent and the overall number of deaths fell more steeply, from 556,902 in 2003 to 553,888 in 2004, a decline of 3,014.
The biggest drop occurred in colorectal cancer, with 1,110 fewer men and 1,094 fewer women dying from the disease. The decline was attributed to broader efforts to screen for the disease and improved treatment.
Similarly, 666 fewer women died of breast cancer and 552 fewer men died of prostate cancer in 2004, probably the result of increased detection and better treatment.
For lung cancer, the picture was mixed, with 333 fewer men dying but 347 more women – reflecting the fact that women were slower to take up smoking and started quitting later.
“President Nixon declared war on cancer in the 1970s, and we are finally beginning to see some of the fruits,” said Dr. Robert Figlin of the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif.
But experts cautioned that the growing incidence of obesity and declines in physical activity threaten to reverse many of the hard-won gains.
In addition, doctors warn that access to cancer care also needs to be improved.
“For all cancers, African- American men have a 38 percent higher death rate than Caucasians and African-American women have an 18 percent higher rate,” said Dr. Christy Russell, an oncologist at the University of Southern California/Norris Cancer Hospital. “I find those statistics sobering.”
The New York Times and Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
