Contents page 1 — The conquer cancer? Unlikely page 2 — Jens Spahn wants to defeat the cancer in a few decades, On a page
read The diagnosis of cancer is a shock. From now on, life is marked by the fear of death. And the everyday life stays soaked up in the hospital with surgeries and intake of powerful medications with many side effects. Cancer is the disease, before the Germans fear the most (forsa-survey, PDF). And you seem to meet more and more people. “A completely cancer-free family,” said the SPD-health politician Karl Lauterbach in an Interview with the times, “in the future will be the exception.” Something that is also confirmed by Ulrich keilholz, Director of the Charité Comprehensive Cancer Center in Berlin: “cancer is most of the a lot more present than in the past.”
Confirm the stats? Indeed, the number of new Cancer cases per year is increasing. It was in Germany in 1999 still below 400,000, were 2014 affected 475,000 people, estimates the Robert Koch Institute. And in the year 2030, predicts the German cancer research centre, it could be over 600,000.
However, such statistics should be regarded with caution. Because the older a person is, the higher the probability that he is suffering from cancer. In order to understand the development of the cancer numbers, you have to take into account the best by crediting to different cancers in a statistical analysis of more or less weight. This is called age standardisation allows to compare cancer rates between different age groups or at different times. Because Germany is ageing, the absolute number of new Cancer cases, the age-standardized Rate for years. We take the example of prostate cancer: the Ageing of the German, die statistically, fewer and fewer people in this type of tumour. But because there are so many old people die twice as many men with prostate cancer than 40 years ago (the centre for cancer registry data, Barnes et al., 2016, PDF).
– cancer is growing, if the man survived, another
In his book, The king of all diseases. Cancer – a biography of oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee describes cancer in the years before the Second world war, the importance of: infections such as tuberculosis, smallpox, and typhoid fever could be due to Hygiene and treated with antibiotics prevented, so that patients lived longer. A effect of medical progress is reinforced, for example through vaccinations and by the recent decline of strokes and heart attacks, which are today only half as many people die as in 1990 (German society for cardiology, 2017, PDF). And if more people do not get many diseases in the first place, or survive, may later develop more cancer. However, the medical progress also in the field of Oncology is not slower than in other areas, says the doctor, and epidemiologist, Volker Arndt German cancer research center. But there is not a cancer, “but many different tumor diseases. The new targeted therapies interfere with specific metabolic processes in different tumors.” So while there were many individual successes, but no General breakthrough in cancer research.
The Occurrence of different cancer types depends also on a multitude of factors, which are not always clear. In the case of leukemia, scientists do not know why they are occurring now more frequently. The increase in the number of lung cancer cases is mainly due to the Smoking behavior of the women to explain. So, while the number of Smoking men has decreased for a long time, the number of Smoking to women in the late nineties and the early two thousands. In spite of the Ageing of the German there are, however, not all types of cancer and more diseases than in the past. Cancer of the colon, less people fall ill can be found, since the use of colonoscopies precursors of the tumor and treated (whole paragraph: the centre for cancer registry data, Barnes et al., 2016, PDF).
