Although breast cancer gets a lot of the attention, prostate cancer is by far more common.
14% of men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime.
Frequently at least one-third of randomly autopsied older men has a slow-growing prostate cancer tumor that they were not aware of.
And although deaths from prostate cancer are supposedly falling, I believe that there actually increasing.
The causes of death that are attributed to cancers are falling.
Instead of men dying from prostate cancer, they are dying from the treatments for prostate cancer in many cases.
But since the prostate cancer treatment was done years before the death, doctors list the cause of death is something other than cancer.
You could see something similar at work in some of the large big-city police departments.
They try not to accept crime reports for major crimes.
Because that way they can show a drop in the crime rate.
But it’s really just a drop in how they report the crime rate.
You can see it here in this chart:
Prostate cancer screening was changed, and the result was a HUGE drop in diagnosed cases.
As this story reports:
The decrease in early-stage prostate cancer occurred within a year after the release of the draft recommendation, and an alternative explanation for the decline is unlikely, the researchers said.
The results “sound an alarm that maybe we’ve gone too far,” said Dr. David Penson, a Vanderbilt University prostate cancer specialist who wrote a journal editorial. “Basically we’ve gone from one extreme to the other.”
The results of screening and prostate cancer treatment is often a very poor outcome.
Standard treatments include removing the prostate, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy.
While they may sometimes help eliminate the cancer itself, the side-effects can last a lifetime.
Patients experience an incredible decrease in lifestyle.
Erectile dysfunction is common.
What is interesting about prostate cancer is that if it’s left untreated, most prostate cancers don’t get any worse.
Even more interesting is that at least 25% of cases spontaneously disappear.
It may be better not to treat most prostate cancers, but it would sure be nice to have some honest reporting.
Citations
SEER Stat Fact Sheets: Prostate Cancer
http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html
LAPD underreported serious assaults, skewing crime stats for 8 years
http://www.latimes.com/local/cityhall/la-me-crime-stats-20151015-story.html
Less prostate cancer and screening seen after new guidance
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/475ff126f3154018afcff45519fc785d/less-prostate-cancer-and-screening-seen-after-new-guidance
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