Movember 2022: Prostate Cancer Mortality Trend Update
Recent stalling doesn't bode well -- get your cancer screening!
Last Week, I posted about my Movember fundraising motivation, and thanks to everybody who boosted up my numbers! Huzzah!
Movember Fundraiser
First, here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:
Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
My Movember facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
Those are the two official links I have via Movember, and they’ve given me “official assets” to play with to promote the fundraiser, as I’ve raised over $6,600 for the org since 2017.
A stall in prostate cancer mortality improvement
Last year, I was able to write about a large improvement in prostate cancer mortality, especially from 1999 to 2019.
Well, let me update a graph, and I have some worrying news.
My prior graph stopped in 2019. I have data for 2020 and 2021 now.
That the crude rate started to rise in 2016 doesn’t bother me. The population is aging, so one does expect this sort of thing to occur.
That the age-adjusted death rates have stalled out since then does bother me, and that there was a small increase in 2020 is slightly concerning.
Please, men, get your cancer screenings
Drop in screenings linked to increase in advanced prostate cancer cases
A large new study of U.S. veterans suggests that when prostate cancer screening rates go down, the number of men diagnosed with advanced cancer then rises.
Researchers found that across 128 U.S. veterans health centers, the rate of PSA screening for prostate cancer declined between 2008 and 2019 — a period where guidelines came out recommending against routine screening.
But patterns varied among the individual centers, with some maintaining high screening rates.
And in subsequent years, the study found, a trend emerged: VA centers with higher PSA screening rates had fewer cases of metastatic prostate cancer, while more cases were diagnosed at centers with lower screening rates.
This preceded the pandemic, as you can see.
But this is a concern I have for the pandemic, because there was a drop in health care utilization in 2020 for non-COVID purposes, and many people missed cancer screenings (men and women both), and from direct experience, more advanced cancer is more difficult to deal with, and in Stu’s case, it’s now incurable, though treatable.
Obviously, more advanced cancer is going to have lower survival rates.
But we can see right here a shift occurred around 2016 or so where prostate cancer mortality improvement substantially slowed, and in 2020, the age-adjusted death rate slightly increased. If people missed screenings, there can be long-term effects.
Movember Fundraiser
So you don’t have to scroll up, here are my fundraiser links again:
They both link to the same fundraiser.
Thanks!