Cancer: What Progress?

The battle against cancer is not going as well as federal officials have claimed, according to the General Accounting Office. In a report submitted to Congress last week, the agency charged that biases in statistics often cited by the National Cancer Institute as a yardstick of success "artificially inflate the amount of 'true' progress."

GAO investigators focused on changes between 1950 and 1982 in the five- year survival rates for victims of twelve types of cancer. Advances in detection and treatment, they conceded, had resulted in improvements in these survival rates (measured from the time of diagnosis), except for stomach cancer. Yet they criticized the NCI's reliance on these rates as proof of gains against cancer, noting that some types of the disease, such as breast and prostate cancers, can progress for ten or 15 years before proving fatal. Also, the GAO observed, survival rates reveal nothing about the life expectancy or quality of life of the victims: "Using survival rates alone to reach conclusions about general progress is therefore inappropriate."

NCI Director Vincent DeVita Jr. called the report "offensive," stressing that the institute's assessments take into account mortality and incidence rates as well as five-year survival rates. David Korn, dean of the Stanford medical school and chairman of the National Cancer Advisory Board, agreed. He denounced the report as a "shabby polemic."