A hundred years ago you could make it to age 50 where maybe 5 dozen different things would kill you. Now all but cancer and heart disease are off the grid, for the most part. So when people die, it's usually from those two things. One in Three? By the time you reach age 70 it's 50-50. Now if you're taking about survival rates. Well for some pretty good others not so good. Lung cancer rates are 15% and they haven't improved. BUT, after billions and billions and billions of dollars survival rates for breast cancer levelled out more than a decade ago. Think of that the next time you give to a walkathon.

For once, I agree with SR (well...maybe not the first, but it is rare).

Andrew, I hope your father pulls through. It must be a horrible experience for you.

That being said. It's still unclear to me whether or not there are truly more incidents of cancer in our society today. Are we just better at detecting it? Are we just healthier in most other respects that cancer itself is easier to spot because we are not dealing with polio, smallpox, measles, and any number of vitamin deficiencies?

I honestly don't know and would really like to see some statistics one way or the other.

There was a wonderful NYT article a few months ago that compared medical records from the American Civil War to today and it is just amazing the difference in health between now and then.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/health/30age.html?ex=1170824400&en=5f7121e33571dd42&ei=5070

--or--

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2eopye

(you may need a paying subscription)

Whereas back then, people in their 30s would suffer from crippling arthritis and a host of other horrible ailments. Today, it's something that doesn't even cross our mind.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of cancer research or the trauma that it puts individuals and their families through, but I am trying to emphasize that we've come a long way.

Really, I just thought I should dispute the comments from SR: "BUT, after billions and billions and billions of dollars survival rates for breast cancer levelled out more than a decade ago. Think of that the next time you give to a walkathon."

The statistics don't really seem to justify such pessimism. Indeed, I believed that kind of idea when I began writing the book. But my research seemed to show the opposite.

See page three of these Cancer Statistics from the American Cancer Society.

http://www.cancer.org/downloads/STT/CAFF2007PWSecured.pdf

There is a graph that shows extent to which breast cancer mortality - the most robust of cancer statistics - have been declining in the last decade. Its a drop of about twenty per cent. And the curve continues downwards.

Much of this is the result of the brilliance of tamoxifen, for preventing recurrence. But the new wave of aromatase inhibitors will continue the downward trajectory.

So the walkathons, the billions of the dollars, the cancer research campaigns, produce results. Slow as progress might be, it is certainly continuing.

Best estimates is that in the US ~ 20 billion with a B is spent annually on breast cancer research Even the DoD spends roughly a billion dollars a year. Not that people survive but that it's a misallocation of the dollars we have. And not to put too harsh a spin on it, there are all sorts of radical treatments that are no longer employed or acceptable for all sorts of non medical reasons. If breasts were an internal organ research spending would drop by 50% tomorrow.

In fact most work into chemotherapy improvements since the early 1990's has been in the areas of 'tolerance' not efficacy. That is, since the early 1990's most of the work has gone into making treatment modalities less harsh, less toxic, more bearable, not better or more efficient at treating cancer. Drug companies and hospitals went this way because it's more cost effective to employ outpatient and short-stay treatments than it is to keep someone in a bed for 3-4 days once a month for six months.

In the meantime not only have survival rates for lung cancers flattened out, rates for brain cancer, CNS lymphoma and the like have actually gone down. And very little work is being done with them. A few drugs in trial that's all.

It's just a matter of allocation. Would that we patients had the choices and the resources that Breast Cancer have. But of course there aren't any ribbon magnets and Oprahthons for us.

Doesn't just benefit Breast Cancer patients. One of the biggest reasons that it gets so much funding (other than the ratios of various cancer incidences to the entire population, when compared to the specific ratio between breast cancer rates in women) is that we understand it better. When I came to work as a molecular cancer geneticist at PENN, there had just been a breakthrough with the BRCA1 gene- we had identified and statistically correlated a specific gene mutation to a specific form of cancer. This caused a HUGE boom in breast cancer research funding, especially from the private sector, because we were that much closer to solving the problem. Everyone wants to pick a winner. All that aside, however, the reasearch money that goes towards breast cancer isn't so specific to that one disease as one might think. One breast cancer grant can fund the genotyping of tens or hundreds of genes on thousands of samples- where only a handful of those genes are solely related to breast cancer. The rest, between signalling pathway genes, cell reproduction, DNA or RNA transcription etc., exist as data that can be shared and applied accross many different fields of study. My lab handles prostate and melanoma studies-- but we also run breast cancer genes and work with a pediatric oncologist, because all these specific fields share a huge common ground when it comes to understanding how our bodies function in relation to any and all kinds of cancer.

Besides, Breasts are important!