Cancer: Has it been more prevalent in recent decades than it has in times past (ie. prior to WWII)?

[brentspeak]

Today's medical science can more accurately diagnose cancer in individuals than it could before WWII. And, certainly, many illnesses that were once called something else in previous centuries might very well actually have been cancers -- they just weren't known as "cancers". But beyond that, are cancers affecting a greater percentage of human beings today than they were before WWII?

[napi21]

1. I have always believed that cancer has always existed, but wasn't

diagnosed as such. I recall my grandmother talking about lots of weird named diseases and some people died from. I suspect most of those diseases are still around today, but are called something different.

[bigmonkey]

2. The reply you always hear is this:

"People live much longer now, they don't die from other things they used to die of, and diagnosis is so much better now that it just seems that way."

This usually stops the discussion. Mind you, the conclusion skips a step of evaluation - all things being equal, if folks in the past had had all our advantages in medicine, would the lower exposure to carcinogens have yielded a lower cancer rate? The discussion never gets that far, which is to the advantage of anyone wanting to pooh-pooh environmental causes of cancer.

The 1985 movie "Bliss" speculated that information on environmentally-caused cancer was being suppressed. When one realizes that over 50k new chemical compounds exist now that didn't exist before WWII, and that virtually none have been properly tested for long-term effects (although a small number have), and that many are long-lived and bioactive, the probability of increased cancer rates seems high on the face of it.

[brook]

3. I am old enough

to have noticed -as it was happening- all the new carcinogens that were introduced after the war. Sure, there's always been cancer - but there's pretty much no doubt in my mind that we have increased rates due to "Better Living". (Dupont motto?)

[trof]

4. "Better living through chemistry" I think.

[brook]

6. Yep! That's it.

Thanks for filling in the blank. Senior Moment here.

[trof]

8. My life is one unending senior moment.

[trof]

5. Maybe a combination of both arguments.

Or theories.
The two biggies are cardio and cancer, I think.
Seems to me we've made more progress in cardio, which I think is still the #1 cause of death.
Cancer may outstrip it soon.

As a physician friend says "Life, itself, is a sexually transmitted terminal disease."

[juno jones]

7. My own experience...

...we lost a few members of our (formerly) farming family to skin cancer which was pretty common for farmers and outdoor types even then, but only in recent years has my family had problems with other cancers. Both of my parents died from enviromental exposure, my mom from mesothimeloma (asbestos, probably from working in outdated state hospitals as a PT) and my dad from multiple myloma (probably from radiation exposure, he was stationed in the south seas during the korean war, when we were doing all that testing, several of his buddies died at the same time from the same 'rare' cancer...) So I'd say, yeah, enviroment does contribute...

[trof]

9. Farming and crop dusting.

My mother-in-law died from lung cancer.
Never smoked.
Nor her husband or kids.
She was a stay-at-home farm wife.

But the dusters sprayed the rice fields seasonally.

[Raine]

12. Yes...

My mother died from breast cancer, she remembered as a child crops being sprayed (in the area of California they call the fruit bowl) by crop dusters. They sprayed right next to the school yard while her and the other children were outside playing. :-(

[brentspeak]

11. I'm sorry to hear that

My mom died from breast cancer, and my dad had testicular cancer (but survived). But they were both relatively young when they were diagnosed, and we've always lived in the suburbs. Carcinogens seem to be everywhere now.

[earth mom]

10. Yes, cancer is more common these days. Our air, water & land is poisoned.

All courtesy businesses-big and small-and their friends in Washington D.C. :grr:

[EstimatedProphet]

13. Possibly

1) People live longer today than ever in the past, and this means that more are living to an age where they contract it;

2) We have many heavily populated areas which are polluted with carcinogens, for example "cancer alley", the area along the Mississippi river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans which is a prime location of oil and chemical processing plants;

3) Nuclear testing has left some amounts of strontium-90 replacing the calcium in our bones, and overall increased background radiation slightly;

4) Ozone depletion ain't helping.

Likely there's other causes too.

[LeftishBrit]

14. Yes, but mainly in the sense that people live longer and so are more likely to get cancer

whereas in previous generations, many people died of infections, malnutrition, in childbirth, etc.; and so didn't live to the age where cancer is relatively common.

I believe that cancer is less common in developing countries for the same reason.

That being said, reducing pollution would certainly reduce the rates of some forms of cancer.

[robcon]

15. The age-adjusted cancer levels are constant... EXCEPT

for lung cancer, which is much, much more prevalent than 50 years ago.

[WinkyDink]

16. Brain cancer seems more prevalent to me.

For my first 35 years, I knew no-one who died from brain cancer. Since then, I've known two, and read of too many more (the most famous perhaps being Lee Atwater and Tug McGraw).

[Odin2005]

17. People are living longer and rarely die from infectious deseases now days.

[ChickMagic]

18. It's a combination of things

I've always said that if we could live long enough, we'd all get cancer. We're living longer now than ever before, so cancer is showing up more. However, environmental issues play into it for younger people as does the thinning ozone.

[TX-RAT]

20. A few more factors.

We forget the periods when everybody was burning wood for all their energy needs. Imagine all the house's and buildings in New York, Los Angeles and all other city's and communities burning wood on an every day basis. Lung disease was rampant during those times.

[enki23]

19. to a great extent, it goes along with our successes against heart disease

as well as other major causes of death. in other words, much (though quite likely not all) of the increase is due to demographic factors. that is, the population is older. something is going to get you. and if you live long enough, you *will* get cancer.

[undeterred]

21. It seems like a greater percentage of domestic pets are affected

and this might be easier to measure because their lifespan is shorter. I've had two dogs of my own, both have had cancer- one at age 11, another at 7. The second one is a 7 year cancer survivor due to the fact that I took him to a world class vet school where he got some cutting edge technolgy. My dog is a mix breed and I don't know his gene pool. BUT while I was going for treatment I met an awful lot of people who had purebred animals, the kind you spend big bucks on, and whose gene pool is pretty well known going back several generations. The family medical history on these dogs is better known than most people know theirs (how many of us really know what our great-grandparents died of?)

Anyway, there were a lot of purebred dogs with absolutely no family history of cancer who developed it. Some were getting it at an early age. There was a 3 year old championship Siberian Husky with the same diagnosis my dog had- he did not respond to treatment and had to have his leg amputated; my dog responded to treatment. The owner was just about to breed his dog when the cancer was discovered and it was a real shocker.

And people are feeding their dogs much better than they used to.