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■ Healthcare

Continued From Page 10 — more than breast , prostate and pancreatic cancers combined . It causes 2.5 times more deaths than colorectal cancer , the second leading cause of death from cancer in the US .
◾ About 8 out of 10 ( 81 percent ) of deaths from lung cancer in 2022 are expected to be caused from smoking cigarettes . Both the amount and how long someone smokes increase the risk of dying from lung cancer . People who smoke are about 25 times more likely to develop lung cancer than those who never smoked .
◾ Second-hand smoke causes almost 3 percent of new diagnoses of lung cancer and is expected to cause about 3 percent of deaths from it in 2022 .
◾ After smoking , the next leading cause of lung cancer is exposure to radon gas , which is released from soil and can build up indoors .
◾ Nonsmoking-related deaths from lung cancer would rank as the 8th leading cause of death from cancer if they were classified separately .
The risk of dying from prostate cancer decreased by about 50 percent from the mid- 1990s to the mid-2010s due to improved treatment and earlier detection through screening with prostate specific antigen ( PSA ) testing , which helps find cancer when it is only in the prostate ( localized ). But in recent years , the risk of dying from prostate cancer is only decreasing by 0.6 percent a year . The cause for this slowing progress may be related to changes in screening guidelines .
Despite the contribution of screening to a reduction in mortality , there was increasing evidence that PSA testing was causing undue harm through overdiagnosis and overtreatment of prostate cancer . As a result , the U . S . Preventive Services Task Force ( USPSTF ) changed their screening guidelines .
In 2008 , the USPSTF recommended against routine screening with PSA testing for men age
“ Cancer continues to be the second most common cause of death in the U . S . after heart disease . A total of 1.9 million new cancer cases and 609,360 deaths from cancer are expected to occur in the United States in 2022 .”
75 and older and in 2012 for all men , which led to fewer men being screened .
At first , reduced PSA testing was followed by rapid declines in the diagnosis of prostate cancer . But from 2014 to 2018 , the incidence rate for local-stage disease stayed stable , whereas incidence rates for regional-stage disease rose each year by 4 percent and by 6 percent for distant-stage disease .
As a result , the proportion of prostate cancers diagnosed at a distant stage has more than doubled over the past 10 years , from 3.9 percent to 8.2 percent .
ACS researchers note that “ controversy remains about the underutilized potential of the PSA test ” to reduce deaths from prostate cancer by detecting potentially fatal disease earlier .
“ One study found that after the 2012 USPSTF guideline changes , there was a steeper drop in PSA testing in Black men than in White men ,” says Siegel . “ That ’ s concerning because early detection is especially important for Black men , who are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer as White men .”
In females , breast cancer incidence rates have been slowly increasing by about 0.5 percenr a year since the mid-2000s . This rise in diagnoses is due in part to more women having obesity , having fewer children or having their first baby after age 30 . Declines in breast cancer mortality have slowed in recent years , probably related to rising incidence as well as unchanged mammography rates .
Racial / ethnic , socioeconomic , and geographic disparities in cancer occurrence and outcomes largely show longstanding inequalities in wealth that make access to high-quality healthcare difficult for some people . These disparities can be attributed in large part to historical and persistent structural racism in the united States experienced by all people of color .
Cancer disparities occur when barriers to high-quality cancer prevention , early detection and treatment create differences in cancer occurrence and outcomes based on
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Screenings for breast and colon cancers are an essential part of early detection , and therefore , better outcomes .
Photo : Getty Images / iStockphoto / kali9
Photo : Getty Images / iStockphoto / Mohammed HaneefaNizamudeen
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