Movember 2023: Prostate Cancer Mortality Trend Update
Some disturbing signs that the success story of prostate mortality is reversing
Let’s take a look at recent prostate cancer mortality experience, which has a disturbing recent trend, but first, let’s check in on the fundraiser.
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
And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:
Here’s the progress thus far:
Prostate Cancer Death Rates: A Turnaround in Mortality?
As I have done in prior years, let’s look at the long-term, high-level mortality for prostate cancer in the U.S.
As you can see, there was a slow increase in prostate cancer mortality, with a peak around 1992, and since then it came way down… until recently.
The crude rate is the number of prostate cancer deaths per total number of men alive. This is affected by the age distribution in the population, so as the population has gotten older with the aging of the Baby Boomers, the crude rate has increased even though survivorship from prostate cancer continued to improve.
The age-adjusted death rate fixes that problem. You divide up men into ten-year age groups, calculate the death rate from prostate cancer for each group, and then do a weighted average of those rates with fixed weights based on a reference population (currently based on the year 2000.) This prevents having too many effects from the aging of the population.
So we still have something going on recently, even with the age-adjusted death rates… let’s focus on that recent movement.
Prostate Cancer Mortality, 2002-2022
I’m ignoring what the crude rate is doing, but let’s see the prostate cancer age-adjusted death rate, increasing from 18.5 in 2020 up to 19.4 in 2022.
A 5% increase in two years.
Now, this is very little compared to many of the other causes of death we have seen in recent years, and I will be highlighting suicide and drug overdose deaths among men in future posts.
However, cancer tends to be a slow-moving disease (for most people), and this may be reflecting that men missed screenings during the pandemic or treatment.
From 1999 to 2019, the mortality improvement for prostate cancer was such that the age-adjusted death rate had decreased by over 40% in 20 years. That was a compound annual improvement rate of 2.6% per year.
Are we seeing a reversal of that improvement?
Let’s hope not.
