Statistics of Survival

Once they have a clue to the cause of a disease, medical researchers often make steady progress in the search for a cure. But not in the case of lung cancer. Doctors have long been convinced that cigarette smoking is a major cause, Dr. Isidor S. Ravdin reminded a California seminar for science writers, but in the past decade the number of fatal cases of lung cancer has increased alarmingly. Death rates have shot up 73% in men and 18% in women. The death rates from other kinds of cancer have also increased--cancer of the kidney, 19% in males, and cancer of the pancreas, 24%; cancer of the ovary, 13%. And the medical profession, said Dr. Ravdin, can offer no explanation for the unfortunate statistics.

Speaking as the president of the American Cancer Society, Dr. Ravdin hastened to add that the news is not all bad. Death from cancer of the uterus, he reported, declined by 29% during the past ten years because of the widespread and successful campaign for annual physical checkups among women and because of the Pap test, which permits early detection. Mortality from cancer of the stomach dropped sharply (32% in men, 36% in women), perhaps as a result of changed diet.

No Change. The mortality rate of cancer of the colon and rectum could be much lower than it is, said Dr. Ravdin. Early detection and prompt treatment could save 30,000 of the 40,000 patients who die from it each year. But for breast cancer the formula of early detection and prompt treatment no longer seems to be the panacea it once was. "Despite all that has been done, the death rate from breast cancer has not changed one bit."

Leukemia's estimated rise to more than 15,000 new cases this year is also discouraging. But on the basis of overall progress, said Dr. Ravdin, "we are making challenging gains. Last year alone we saved some 44,000 cancer patients who would have died had they developed the disease ten years ago. We have the means at hand to save virtually all of the women who develop uterine cancer, and given ideal conditions, salvage those who develop cancer of the colon and rectum."

Other researchers added other statistics from the war against cancer:

> Leukemia, reported the World Health Organization, has strange geographic preferences that might contain some valuable clues to the origin of the disease. In the U.S., mortality from leukemia is 50% higher in cities than in rural areas. The disease generally seems to thrive in a belt stretching across the north of the country, particularly west of the Mississippi. In New York City, it occurs twice as often among the Jewish population as among Protestants or Roman Catholics. Mortality from leukemia is high in the U.S., Denmark and Israel but relatively low in France, Ireland, Italy and Japan.

> Wilms's tumor, a cancer that attacks the kidneys of children and is often fatal, is yielding to new treatment. Reporting at the Cancer Society seminar, Dr. Sidney Farber of Children's Hospital in Boston said that radiotherapy and surgery had previously been effective in 40% of cases, but in the other 60% death usually resulted because the malignancy spread to the lungs. Now an antibiotic (Actinomycin D) has been brought into the battle and, combined with surgery and radiotherapy, the drug has raised the apparent survival rate to 81%.

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