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SEER statistics by cancer type & mortality (est 2019)

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Posted 5/28/2019 4:25 PM (GMT 0)
It was not easy formatting data for publication in this forum, so please excuse the ragged appearance. Stats are from https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html

Ranking - Type of Cancer - Est New Cases - Deaths - %Mortality


1    Breast Cancer (Female)      268,600    41,760    15.5


2    Lung and Bronchus Cancer    228,150    142,670    62.5


3    Prostate Cancer             174,650    31,620    18.1


4    Colorectal Cancer            145,600    51,020    35.0


5    Melanoma of the Skin         96,480    7,230       7.5


6    Bladder Cancer                80,470    17,670    22.0


7    Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma          74,200    19,970    26.9


8    Kidney and Renal Pelvis      73,820      14,770    20.0


9    Uterine Cancer                61,880    12,160    19.7


10    Leukemia                     61,780    22,840    37.0


Cancer of Any Site              1,762,450    606,880

A presentable and downloadable spreadsheet can be found here:
2019 Cancer Incidence and Mortality (SEER)

Incidentally, I'm going to allow my URL registration to expire next month. Anyone who may have been following my blog (both of you lol) can still get to it via my HW profile.

Post Edited (RobLee) : 5/28/2019 12:41:54 PM (GMT-6)

Posted 5/28/2019 6:02 PM (GMT 0)
Not very meaningful when we know that 50% of 50-year olds have PC, 60% of 60-year olds, etc., yet the vast majority of them have NOT been diagnosed, and never will. Use this information to determine the true PC mortality rate...
Posted 5/28/2019 6:29 PM (GMT 0)
I wonder how many of these deaths correspond to people diagnosed in routine screens or without an initial diagnosis of advanced PCa. Probably more than we would like to admit.
Posted 5/28/2019 7:10 PM (GMT 0)
The takeaway...

The number of female BC cases do outnumber the number of PCa cases by nearly 30% (268 vs 174) HOWEVER... 1) to get the "true" number of breast cancer cases, one would need to add about another 15,000 for the 2% of BC cases that occur in males, and 2) all though the number of BC fatalities does outnumber the PCa fatalities by about 100K, the percent of fatalities is higher for PCa by about 3% ... granted, neither is anything to be proud of.

I'm guessing that BC is more readily detected and treated. If prostates were as readily examined as breasts, the number of PCa cases would likely be much higher. Of course, it's nothing that can be proven. I wonder how many men (living and otherwise) actually have PCa but it is never detected?

So, it looks like the BEST cancer (if there is such a thing) is melanoma, with only a 7.5% mortality rate. The worst are lung (LC) with a 62% mortality, Leukemia (my brother) at 37%, CRC at 35% (both about 1 in 3), and NHL (my wife) at 27%.

So which of the top two is more deadly? is it PCa with around one in six or BC with a one in eight mortality?

My nearest cousin died from multiple myeloma, but that doesn't even appear in the chart (Google quotes that "Multiple myeloma (MM) is the second most commonly diagnosed blood cancer, after non-Hodgkin lymphoma, yet few people know much about this deadly disease."

While it's been fun playing with this chart as I wait for my car's AC to be fixed, I wouldn't want to go thru it again. Computers used to be so much more... how you say, fascinating? thirty years ago. Or maybe it was just because I was so much younger. Or better paid.
Posted 5/28/2019 8:00 PM (GMT 0)

RobLee said...
..the number of BC fatalities does outnumber the PCa fatalities by about 100K...


oops...10K, not 100K

The takeaway: BC & PC are about the same in terms of deaths per year.
Posted 5/28/2019 8:43 PM (GMT 0)

Blackjack said...
Not very meaningful when we know that 50% of 50-year olds have PC, 60% of 60-year olds, etc., yet the vast majority of them have NOT been diagnosed, and never will. Use this information to determine the true PC mortality rate...

You're overreaching here BJ.

The true mortality is just that, the true mortality rate.

It'd be interesting to know how many men have arteriosclerosis while being killed in a car wreck.

"Use this information to determine the true heart disease mortality rate". I think not. That information can and should be used to determine the true mortality rate of males in automobile accidents and not the true mortality rate of heart disease (which that man did not die from, so it should not be factored into the mortality rate for heart disease).


Interesting info RL.
Posted 5/28/2019 9:09 PM (GMT 0)

island time said...

The true mortality is just that, the true mortality rate.

That's naive to ignore the known changes in the denominator. Further example...10 years ago the number diagnosed (denominator) with PC was nearly 80K higher, but the number of actual deaths was about the same. What do you think that did to the "reported mortality rate." Go ahead, stick head in sand. People with real knowledge of what's going on with PC are not so gullible.

Post Edited (Blackjack) : 5/28/2019 3:17:05 PM (GMT-6)

Posted 5/28/2019 9:48 PM (GMT 0)
Thanks RobLee!

I wonder what the data would look like if it focused on prostate cancer with "metastatic potential". Would need to strip out some view of what are true G6 by looking at data on treatment upgrades and shifts out of AS over time. Also it is is probably obvious, but to what do we attribute a decline in new cases detected over time? Is this changing approaches to PSA testing?
Posted 5/28/2019 10:49 PM (GMT 0)
Some real surprises here, biggest to me is melanoma. I’ve always thought that it’s deadly. I suppose it’s because it’s easily caught early thru screening, and more awareness.

Lung cancer, i’d have thought that mortality would be lower, considering the progress that has been publicized.

Prostate cancer, the 18% raised my eyebrows. We only know about those that have been diagnosed. As with any cancer.
Posted 5/28/2019 11:15 PM (GMT 0)
Thanks so much for sharing this, Rob Lee.

Re: Melanoma. I was surprised too but maybe more awareness has led to earlier dx therefore lower death rate.
Posted 5/29/2019 1:31 AM (GMT 0)
I suppose my experience with melanoma is fairly typical: As in many large industries in the US, annual 'occupational health' screenings were a thing at my workplace. In 2006, the screening included a full skin exam for hexavalent chromium fume exposure (an occupational hazard for welders--and since pretty much everyone had been around welding fumes, they checked everyone.

The screening doctor told me, "you have two suspicious moles on your back, you need to have your PCP take a look". And then he gave me his card and asked me to call him after I had things checked. Which I did. And his response? "I was pretty sure I was right"--and when I asked him how he knew--his response was, "I look at 50-75 different people's skin every day, way more than your average PCP does--so I'm pretty good at spotting skin cancers.

So, MM is frequently found early (I had two lesions, one a IA and one a IB) by other general screenings that are done. And, my treatment (13 years ago) was once and done.
Posted 5/29/2019 3:21 AM (GMT 0)
Pancreatic cancer would have been worst in regards to mortality if it had made the list here. Based on number of diagnoses, it didn't make the top 10 with 57K diagnoses--#10 leukemia was at 62K. But the 46K estimated deaths would have put it at third deadliest. Five-year survival rate is only 9%.
Posted 5/29/2019 8:53 PM (GMT 0)
I believe that somebody asked me--way back, maybe yesterday--about the "real" PC incidence...beyond the known "reported incidence." I knew that I had previously posted about this, but was way to busy to look for it then. I found it...from January 2019:



Blackjack said...
Consider the broad impact of the "Wayne County Autopsy Study." The background of the study is that the Detroit medical examiner's office participated in a study which spanned years whereby the prostates of men who died in accidents (only) were examined for at least some amount of "diagnosable" prostate cancer. Some men knew that they had PC, others didn't...but the men all died of accidental causes. The findings were roughly that by age 50, the percentage of men with "diagnosable" PC roughly equaled their age...so 50% of men in their 50s, 60% of men in their 60s, etc.

What that means is that there is a LOT of men walking around with PC who don't know it. And they never will know it, simply because they have not stumbled into the set of circumstances which has led them to have a prostate biopsy. If the DID, they would probably be diagnosed with PC. How many men?

First, the baseline for comparison is the American Cancer Society's estimate of the number of men diagnosed with prostate cancer and alive today in the US...about 2.9 million. (LINK) These men comprise the "reported PC incidence rate" of about 200,000 new cases diagnosed per year.)

So, what's an estimate of the "real incidence rate" of PC, which would be the sum of reported and unreported, but most of which is un-reported? Back of napkin math based on statistics about today's US population of 325 million (LINK):
21 million men in their 50s X 50% = 10.5 million with PC
17 million men in their 60s X 60% = 10.2 million with PC
10 million men in their 70s X 70% = 7.0 million with PC
5 million men in their 80s or more X 80% = 4.0 million with PC
TOTAL estimate of men in US with PC = 31.7 million (real incidence rate)

So about 3 million reported incidence, but about 10X that many men actually "diagnosable"...if only they were biopsied. It's no wonder that one of the PC rules of thumb is that "the greatest risk factor for being diagnosed with PC is having a prostate biopsy."

Powerful numbers which dramatically amplify the notion that prostate cancer is one of the most common, least lethal of all cancers...which was true even when one considers only the reported incidence rates of PC. These numbers also make the case for Active Surveillance even stronger for men diagnosed with low-risk PC, once they realize that millions of men are walking around with similar cases and have never run into the circumstances for a biopsy.

[Deaths by PC are completely unaffected by the measurement of incidence rates...and remain steady at between 25,000 and 30,000 per year.]

Posted 5/30/2019 12:43 AM (GMT 0)
Would be interesting to see what happens to incidence rates when “clinically significant” filter is applied. Or incidence of prostate cancers with progressive potential. We need to get better diagnosis tools to triage accordingly in order to appropriately recognize risks and de-trivialize the disease while at the same time more confidently assuring patients with more indolent biopsies that they are not harboring something more serious. BJ: Until we get better at this, telling someone who has just been diagnosed with PC that a lot of dead people also had it will not be helpful to them.
Posted 5/30/2019 1:35 AM (GMT 0)
A lot of LIVING people have PC...actually. way, way more living people than is “reported.” Geez, I didn’t think it was that complicated.

“One of the least lethal...”. Get it???
Posted 5/30/2019 1:57 AM (GMT 0)
Point was intended to be more subtle than the obvious math.

If anyone knows of data over time of diagnosed population by progressive potential it would be interesting to see.
Posted 5/30/2019 9:59 AM (GMT 0)
I think this thread is useful, because it really does get at a frustration most of us have experienced--that PC DOES seem to be dealt with by a shrug by many, including (shamefully) many in the medical world. It's true, for many, many men, "once and done" is the reality. For the rest, it really, really sucks. And there are enough of the first group for the second group to be hidden--and the male stoicism that is so common helps with that hiding.

What to do about it? What is actually practically possible? I don't know.
Posted 5/30/2019 12:41 PM (GMT 0)
Excellent points made by many here. It occurred to me that the Total Cancers of Any Site MUST exclude many... possibly 90% of the known cancers. Adding another row to my spreadsheet showed an additional 496K (nearly a half million) new cases of other cancers other than the top ten, with an additional 245K, or a quarter million fatalities. So the cancers not included in this table exhibit an approximate 50% mortality rate. Sad.
Posted 5/30/2019 12:56 PM (GMT 0)
Rob, you're right. And those less common ones (pancreatic, esophageal to name 2 that I'm familiar with in people I've known) really are the nasty ones. Arguably, many of them are where some of the major ones were a generation ago. It really wasn't all that long ago when BC was a basic death sentence even with radical mastectomy as the standard of care.
Posted 5/30/2019 3:11 PM (GMT 0)
In The Emperor of all Maladies (which anyone who has or is close to cancer should watch) it is chronicled that the failures of more and more aggressive mastectomies is what ultimately led to the theory of metastasis being put forward. Generally there are blood cancers and solid tumors. Surgeons were cutting deeper and deeper, assuming that the BC had spread deep into body tissues, like tentacles, and that if they kept removing more tissue that eventually the spread could be stopped.

But in fact, no matter how deep they went, the cancer cells would still appear elsewhere in the body. Therefore it was theorized that the cancer must have developed a means of leaping out of the primary site and spread to other areas, most likely by means of body fluids (blood or lymph). It wasn't that long ago... maybe 60-80 years IIRC.

Today we know metastasis to be a fact. Furthermore, many current myths about the origins of cancer as being attributed to modern technology are debunked by the discovery of ancient mummies with petrified tumors, and women who had tied off their breasts in an attempt to starve the cancer.
Posted 6/5/2019 9:14 PM (GMT 0)

AJMan said...

If anyone knows of data over time of diagnosed population by progressive potential it would be interesting to see.

Sure. Here's some fairly recent results of about 1.3M newly diagnosed men from the SEER database:

  • Localized......81.0%
  • Regional.........9.6%
  • Distant............3.2%
  • unstaged.........6.2%
Posted 6/5/2019 11:59 PM (GMT 0)

halbert said...
I think this thread is useful, because it really does get at a frustration most of us have experienced--that PC DOES seem to be dealt with by a shrug by many, including (shamefully) many in the medical world. It's true, for many, many men, "once and done" is the reality. For the rest, it really, really sucks. And there are enough of the first group for the second group to be hidden--and the male stoicism that is so common helps with that hiding.

What to do about it? What is actually practically possible? I don't know.

I think there’s some truth in this. (I’ve never heard it worded like this before).

makes sense
Posted 6/6/2019 1:03 AM (GMT 0)
Thanks BJ,

I also found some data, consistent with your referenced numbers, that split things up by grade, age and give some trends over time. There remains the question on the migration of these numbers over time given upgrades post diagnosis and natural history of the disease that affects the distribution by gravity within the large population of those afflicted. I found some interesting analytic research that projects/models the disease population characteristics across many years and when you dig into the math things gets complicated quick. No matter which way you slice it, prostate cancer is expected to take over 30,000 folks this year in the US. Most having suffered many years of serious quality of life issues. You then couple this with the large pool of survivors who have had their lives altered in significant ways to be cured. This implies a huge impact of the disease in terms of deaths amplified by quality adjusted years of life for those who survive. Research funding is critically affected by how we collectively portray this disease.
Posted 6/11/2019 6:54 PM (GMT 0)

AJMan said...
There remains the question on the migration of these numbers over time given upgrades post diagnosis and natural history of the disease that affects the distribution by gravity within the large population of those afflicted...


That would be a different question, but I agree it is of interest. Several reports are out there chronicling this question of "natural history." One of the most interesting reports, which partially but not comprehensively answers your new question, studied men newly diagnosed with low-risk PC. Many of those men went on to an immediate treatment (typically prostatectomy, or radiation), but some understood that they were candidates for Active Surveillance so they agreed to do nothing for at least a year, then undergo a second, confirmatory biopsy to re-assess their case. The results were three groups: (1) about half had the same Gleason score biopsy outcome as their initial diagnosis, (2) about 25% had a higher Gleason score, and some of them then went on to successful treatment (some stayed on AS), and (3) most interestingly about 25% had a LOWER Gleason score on their second biopsy...and they were probably pretty darned thrilled that they didn't go into an immediate PC treatment after their initial diagnosis, especially after they saw the side effects/problems their initial cohort peers were having post-treatment.

Pretty interesting findings.
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