A report shows rapid development of new cancer treatment and detection is helping people live longer. But more people are also getting diagnosed, and at younger ages.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A new report on cancer offers both bad news and good news. The American Association for Cancer Research looked at the last 30 years. It says cancer is growing more common, especially with younger people. It also says the death rate has dropped significantly. NPR’s Yuki Noguchi reports.
YUKI NOGUCHI: Lourdes Monje was 25 and had moved to Philadelphia to switch careers to become a teacher when a trip to the doctor to investigate a lump turned into a breast cancer diagnosis. That Stage 4 diagnosis four years ago threw everything Monje knew about life into a different gear.
LOURDES MONJE: Everything shifted from that point on. Everything became about making sure that the cancer didn’t try to keep spreading, knowing that it had spread already so quickly.
NOGUCHI = BYLINE: Monje felt devastated. But the oncologist explained that new treatments were much more effective than a generation ago, and that proved true. The new targeted therapies for breast cancer started working. The drugs have beaten back most of the tumors.
MONJE: I feel like my quality of life is pretty good, you know, considering that I thought I was going to die.
NOGUCHI = BYLINE: Four years after diagnosis, now 29, Monje is teaching part-time and grateful for stability and the potential of many years left to live.
MONJE: I’m able to spend time with my family. That’s kind of what’s most important to me. I’m able to spend time with my friends. I was able to go on this trip to California to see my – one of my really close, dear friends.
NOGUCHI = BYLINE: Monje’s story is an example of both the good and bad news when it comes to cancer – good in the sense of being able to access life-prolonging new treatments unavailable a generation ago, and bad in the sense that cancer incidence is increasing, especially among young adults like Monje. Jane Figueiredo is a researcher at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and one of the co-authors of the American Association for Cancer Research report. She says it shows treatments and better detection methods have made even highly lethal cancers like lung or melanoma much more survivable.
JANE FIGUEIREDO: New therapies, including immunotherapies, have been very successful across a number of different cancers.
NOGUCHI = BYLINE: Similarly, she says, tools like artificial intelligence are able to scan patient databases to identify common features of cancer, for example, making it easier to identify medicines that might target a person’s specific disease. In other words, says Figueiredo, never before has cancer treatment moved so swiftly toward finding new cures. But at the same time, increased rates of obesity and alcohol consumption, and environmental factors, for example, are causing cancer rates to surge among young people.
FIGUEIREDO: It’s very concerning. These are individuals at the prime of their life. These are individuals that are trying to advance their careers. They may be caring for children or family members, trying to save money. And they often don’t recognize some of their symptoms.
NOGUCHI = BYLINE: All these things mean there are more Americans living with and surviving cancer. Three decades ago, survivorship was relatively rare, and cancer survivors made up fewer than 1.5% of the population. Now they make up 5%. That’s 18 million Americans living with a cancer diagnosis in their past.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News.
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