Cancer incidence and mortality continue to decline, with the most dramatic decreases in lung, prostate, and colorectal cancers among men, and breast and colorectal cancers in women, according to the latest national report card.
"Overall cancer incidence rates for all racial/ethnic groups combined decreased by 0.7% per year during 1999-2006 for both sexes combined, by 1.3% per year during 2000-2006 for men, and by 0.5% per year during 1998-2006 for women," authors from the American Cancer Society, the CDC, the National Cancer Institute, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries concluded.
The report, which has become an annual ritual, was published online in the ACS journal, Cancer.
There has been a decline in cancer death rates since the early 1990s and that trend appears to be durable.
"The decreases were slightly larger for men, who had declines of 1.5% per year during 1993-2001 and 2.0% per year during 2001-2006 compared with women, whose cancer death rates declined 0.8% per year during 1994-2002 and 1.5% per year during 2002-2006," the authors wrote.
But the news was not all good. As men saw decreased rates of prostate, lung, oral, stomach, brain, and colorectal cancers, there was a concurrent increase in the cancers of the kidney, renal, liver, and esophagus -- as well as increases in leukemia, myeloma, and melanoma of the skin.
For women the story was similar -- decreased rates of breast, colorectal, ovarian, cervical, uterine corpus, and oral cancers, but an uptick in lung, thyroid, pancreas, bladder, and kidney cancers, as well as increases in non-Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma, and leukemia.
Colorectal cancer is a focus of this year's report, not a surprising choice because the news here is good: "CRC death rates have declined since 1984 in both men and women, with an accelerated rate of decline since 2002 (for men) and 2001 (for women)."
And a "microsimulation model" suggests that death rates from colorectal cancer could be reduced by 36% over the next decade if "1995-2000 trends for risk factor prevalence, screening, and treatment continue."
But the authors point out that increased obesity among younger Americans could derail this trend.
The annual report often paints a rosy picture based on a patchwork of data collected from a number of sources and analyzed using a complex array of statistical methods.
The report's lead author, Brenda K. Edwards, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute, and her colleagues, provide detailed descriptions of potential problems -- so much so that the report includes two pages of possible limitations.