|
TORONTO (CP) -- While the lung cancer death rate for men has decreased in the last 15 years, it has increased alarmingly for women in the same period, the Canadian Cancer Society said Wednesday.
Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths for men and women, but the death rate for men has dropped 17 per cent since 1988 while it has increased 46 per cent for women.
"What we are seeing now in terms of lung cancer is the result of smoking patterns prior to the late 1980s," said Dr. Barbara Whylie, the society's director of cancer control policy.
She said men took up smoking in a big way earlier than women did. By the mid-'60s the number of men smoking started to decrease while smoking among women increased until the late '80s.
The good news is overall cancer death rates for men and women have dropped in the last 15 years, and the society predicts further drops in the future. But the gender divide remains. Death rates dropped by 12 per cent for men and 3.1 per cent for women. The death rate refers to the number of people per 100,000.
Overall cancer rates for men have dropped by 4.2 per cent since 1988, while it has increased 3.5 per cent for women largely due to lung and breast cancer.
As lung cancer rates are linked to smoking, with a lag time of about 25 years, Whylie said the good news is "since women's smoking rates have declined, we can predict that over the next decade we'll start to see lung cancer rates for women decline as well."
Even though smoking rates are declining and lung cancer rates will follow, Garfield Mahood, executive director of the Non-Smokers' Rights Association, believes that isn't good enough.
Especially since teenagers, even though they are armed with the statistics and information about tobacco, are still taking up smoking.
"Why would kids take adults seriously about the risks when they go into the tens of thousands of corner stores across this country and see power walls of cigarettes -- a product that kills one out of two of its long-term users," Mahood said Wednesday.
"Those power walls are positioned next to the candy. Why would kids think that this is really a product that carries serious risks? Governments don't care about these kids and we aren't holding governments responsible and forcing them to care."
Whylie said lung cancer is particularly serious because it is preventable and those who developed it will die, while the survival rates for other cancers have improved. For example, the rates for breast cancer have not changed much in the last 15 years but the death rate has dropped.
"That means 20 per cent more people are surviving breast cancer now than 15 years ago, and you see the same pattern for prostate cancer," said Whylie.
Still the most common types of cancers continue to be breast cancer for women and prostate cancer for men.
Stomach cancer death rates decreased in women by 33 per cent; in men 43 per cent. Colorectal cancer death rates were down by 23 per cent for women, 15 per cent in men.
However, death rates from melanoma increased 23 per cent for women, 41 for men, and from non-Hodgkins lymphoma 28 per cent for women; 26 for men.
The society has been trying to emphasize that at least 50 per cent of cancers can be prevented through healthy living. Despite the public's knowledge about eating healthier and exercising, there is an increasing problem with obesity, particularly in young people.
"There is a real disconnect between what we know can be done (to improve our health) and public policies," said Whylie. "We know high-fat, high-carb diets are damaging to people. Yet what foods are provided to children in schools?
"We know exercise is important yet physical activity programs are withdrawn from schools."
Dr. Terry Sullivan, vice-president of preventive oncology at Cancer Care Ontario, says the message is simple: eat more fruits and vegetables and less fatty meat. But knowing how to make the right choices is not easy.
"There are many things that help to shape that decision. They include labelling and pricing. And all these are under public policy," said Sullivan. "The decline in smoking isn't because everyone got smart. It's because government policies began enacting smoking bylaws."
Add to that a huge aging population and the future may not be all that rosy. The society predicts that individual new cases of cancer will increase by as much as 70 per cent over the next 15 years.
"There's a big challenge for screening and prevention to reduce overall rates of incidence and mortality rate and there's a big challenge for the treatment system to cope with this glacier ... this slow epidemic of cancer that's a function of aging," said Sullivan.
Whylie also sees the future as an uphill battle.
"I don't like the word epidemic but people have likened it to an express train coming down the track. There is going to be an explosion in the number of new cases of cancer occurring among Canadians in the next two decades," she said.
"If the Canadian health care system is going to be prepared to deal with it we need policy makers to make some changes now, make the investments now, and frankly we have not seen any evidence of that happening."
Content provided by ArmMed Media
Revision date: 12 December 2007
Last revised by Amalia K. Gagarina, M.S., R.D.
««« »»»
|
