Why early detection is the best way to beat cancer

Wired has a great cover story this month: Why early detection is the best way to beat cancer.

Ovarian cancer, like most cancers, is measured in four stages. Stage I is early, when the disease is contained in the ovaries. In stage II, it may be present in the fallopian tubes or elsewhere in the pelvis. By stage III, it has migrated into the abdomen or lymph nodes. And by stage IV, the malignancy has spread, or metastasized, into major organs like the liver or uterus. For ovarian tumors discovered in stage I or II, the survival rate 10 years after diagnosis is reassuringly high—almost 90 percent—because treatment is straightforward. But survival rates drop precipitously as the diagnosis shifts to stage III or IV, when the cancer is well established and spreading. Here, the survival rate falls to 20 percent and then to 10 percent.

The US spends billions of dollars to save these late-stage patients, trying to devise better drugs and chemotherapies that might kill a cancer at its strongest. This cure-driven approach has dominated the research since Richard Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. But it has yielded meager results: The overall cancer mortality rate in the US has fallen by a scant 8 percent since 1975. (Heart disease deaths, by comparison, have dropped by nearly 60 percent in that period.) We are so consumed by the quest to save the 566,000 that we overlook the far more staggering statistic at the other side of the survival curve: More than a third of all Americans—some 120 million people—will be diagnosed with cancer sometime in their lives. Their illness may be invisible now, but it's out there. And that presents a great, and largely unexamined, opportunity: Find and treat their cancers early and that 566,000 figure will shrink.

The article certainly makes a compelling case.  But to me it seems there doesn't have to be a choice between early detection and treatment, we must do both to defeat cancer.  There is also important research being done on how to prevent cancer, and that holds a great deal of promise also.

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Happy Holidays everyone!