Report Sheds Light on Trends in Prostate Cancer
Posted: Thursday, August 23, 2018
The welcome news from the most recently published Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer finds that overall cancer death rates continue to decline in men, women, and children in the United States in all major racial and ethnic groups.However, according to a companion report focused on prostate cancer, the decline in prostate cancer mortality has “leveled off.” The complete Annual Report, a collaborative effort among the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, was published online in the journal Cancer.
The companion report on prostate cancer indicated there has been an increase in the incidence of late-stage prostate cancer and that after decades of decline, prostate cancer mortality has stabilized. Specifically, the researchers found that overall prostate cancer incidence rates declined an average of 6.5% each year between 2007 and 2014. However, the incidence of distant disease increased from a rate of 7.8 new cases per 100,000 in 2010 to 9.2 new cases per 100,000 in 2014. However, after 2 decades of decline between 1993 and 2013, prostate cancer mortality leveled off between 2013 and 2015.
Furthermore, the companion report noted a decline in recent prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening in the population, based on a series of national surveys. The reported decline in screening occurred between the 2010 and 2013 surveys, for men between the ages of 50 and 74, and after the 2008 survey, for men aged 75 and older.
“The increase in late-stage disease and the flattening of the mortality trend occurred contemporaneously with the observed decrease in PSA screening in the population,” said Serban Negoita, MD, DrPH, of NCI’s Surveillance Research Program and lead author of the prostate cancer companion study.
