Is it possible to end cancer in an aging and increasingly toxic world?

FRONT PAGE: "In Long Drive to Cure Cancer, Advances Have Been Elusive," by Gina Kolata, New York Times, 24 April 2009.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: "Treating cancer: Illuminating surgery; A clever way of highlighting tumours to make them easier to remove," The Economist, 25 April 2009.

Great chart on jump page shows how death rates from heart disease goes down dramatically over the past half-century and that accidents have been reduced somewhat. Meanwhile, Alzheimers slowly builds from small numbers to about half of what accidents are.

But cancer is a flat line: we improve so much and yet the death numbers remain.

To me, that's just the reality of an aging population because cancer is fundamentally a fellow traveler as we age.

I can tell you from what I learned with daughter Emily: there are plenty of cures out there for childhood cancer, but you can abuse a child with chemo and radiation and surgery in ways that you simply cannot with elders. They just lack the resilience and their cell-division rates have slowed down so much in comparison.

So breakthroughs, like the one described in the Economist where cancer cells are illuminated from within for easier spotting and removal during surgery, but I don't expect cancer to decline that much, even with our coming biology revolution.

People will still die, no matter the delay, and cancer will remain a biggie, yes?

Comments

[Doron]

It is very possible that the numbers will decline, and the reason for this will be not so much a revolution in treatment, but much better earlier detection. cancers detected early have a much higher survival rate.

[Vincent Bataoel]

Cancer, premature aging, and brain diseases such as Alzheimers are all about physiological imbalances. These are not inevitable "natural disasters", as most pharmaceutical age Western pill-prescribing, ready-to-cut, doctors would like the masses to believe. These physiological imbalances all point to a fundamental problem, that the lifestyle of the average American is imbalanced. The immortal solution is to gradually restore balance to our lives, by systematically accounting for how routine activities affect the human physiology.

[jason]

Cancer is a manmade disease.

[BWJones]

The real issue is identifying the cancerous cells in complex tissues. Cancer is a heterogeneous population of cells. We believe we have the tools to start pulling these populations apart, then targeting them with more specific interventions. It is absolutely part of aging, but we are starting in childhood cancers like rhabdomyosarcoma where we can make a big difference.

[Tom Barnett]

Cancer has been around forever. It is simply cell-division going insane. The triggers are many, but the main one is aging, or the slowing down of cell division.

[David Emery]

When we eliminated a lot of the 'quicker' fatal diseases, e.g. substantial reductions in heart related mortalities, people live longer, and as a result cancer rates increase. (The guy that would have died of a heart attack at 60 a half-century ago, now lives on to die of cancer at 80...)

All this makes me wonder, as we get more effective at defeating cancers (and I think we'll make continuing progress), what will take over and kill me at 90, instead of the cancer at 80 or the heart attack at 60? The brain/dementia kinds of things? (I sure hope not!!)