Talking about statistics in lung cancer can be unpleasant, so it won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t want to read on.  The numbers can be harsh. 

   This week, there was a good deal of fanfare about an annual article from the American Cancer Society on US cancer statistics (article is free, but I’ll warn you that it’s pretty dense with numbers) that demonstrated an overall decrease in US cancer death rates for the second straight year.  While last year’s overall results were cause for encouragement, this year’s results made the cancer world more confident that it wasn’t just a one-year aberration.  While there were clear declines in death rates for breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer, the findings for lung cancer offered less cause for celebration.  

   The general trends remained as they have for the past several years.  Prostate cancer and breast cancer were the cancers with the highest incidence (number of new cases diagnosed) in the US among men and women, respectively, followed by lung cancer as the second-most common new cancer diagnosis in both sexes.  Unfortunately, lung cancer again clearly leads the pack in deaths from cancer for men and women.  The estimated numbers for new cases and deaths for the different cancer types by sex in 2007 is as shown:

 (click to enlarge)

Most people don’t realize that breast cancer, for all of the media attention about it, is a much less common cause of death than lung cancer among women.  In fact, lung cancer has picked up remarkably in women over the last few decades.  Until 1987, breast cancer was a more common cause of death in women than lung cancer, but after that the two crossed and lung cancer new cases and deaths have increased in women as breast cancer deaths have declined.  Women have lagged behind men in their trends of rising number of cases, a couple of decades behind men, but while men have had a modest decline in new cases and deaths over the past few years, women have looked like they may be at the peak of the curve, with numbers minimally changed but slightly up.  Here’s the curves for new cases over time, with men and women side by side:

For deaths from cancer over the last several decades, here’s the figure for men:

    and for women: 

Putting it in numbers, deaths from men in the US were about 89,000 in 1989, reached a high of 92,425 since then, and have drifted down slightly, to 89,575 in 2004, the last year with real numbers available.  So that’s pretty much flat, having peaked and started a downward trend in the last 15 years.  In contrast, the numbers for women have gone from 48,000 to 68,000 over that period, with every single year worse than the last.  This is related directly to the later trend of increased smoking among women, while rates of smoking in men have been declining for many years.  There’s a lag of many years between smoking rates and lung cancer population statistics (yes, there are plenty of never-smokers who develop lung cancer, but the big picture view reflects smoking trends). 

   These are the numbers, and there’s not much any of us can do about them, except combat the tobacco lobby and advocate for ourselves to get the media attention and research funding that lung cancer deserves, based on the devastating toll it takes on society.  The terrible reality is that it is hard for the lung cancer community to advocate effectively because we don’t have the number of long-term survivors that other cancers do.  We need to galvanize ourselves and do the best we can with the situation.