why does it seem as though cancer is becoming more and more common?

Question

why does it seem as though cancer is becoming more and more common?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Cancer itself is indeed becoming more common, but not in the way that you might expect.

First, there are new things out there that we have discovered cause all kinds of new cancers that didn’t exist before. Exposure to certain chemicals can cause cancer, and some of these chemicals didn’t exist before so cancer rates are rising among people that are exposed to these chemicals on a regular basis. This is common among people that work in specific fields. We didn’t really know these chemicals caused cancer because a lot of safety studies really only determine the short-term effects of exposure to new chemicals (i.e. are you going to die if you stand next to it for a few hours?) rather than the long-term effects of exposure (i.e. are you going to get cancer if you work with it for 30 years?).

Second, cancer diagnosis are increasing because we have new ways to detect certain types of cancer earlier than ever. This is a really good thing! While it increases the number of people that are diagnosed as having cancer and that statistic looks bad on paper, new detection methods mean that cancer is caught when it’s in its very early stages. This means that it can be treated much more effectively because it’s caught before it metastasizes, or spreads to other parts of the body.

If you look at the most important statistics, cancer deaths are dropping!!! We’re able to catch cancers a lot sooner, get people the proper treatment, and kill cancer a lot more effectively than we were previously able to. Regular checkups are a huge way that cancer is caught early, especially cancers that are easy to check for yourself! If you’re in an age range that is commonly associated with various types of cancer, go get checked or check yourself for unusual lumps or bumps associated with breast cancer to testicular cancer! There’s all kinds of great improvements to the screening processes for all kinds of cancer making the tests less invasive and easier to do!