Aside from the sharp decrease in mortality resulting from breast cancer since 1990, the biggest contributor to declining overall cancer deaths among middle-aged women in the United States and United Kingdom has been the drop in lung cancer deaths.
“Deaths due to intestinal cancer, uterine cancer, stomach cancer—they're all going down, too. These are good times to be a statistician,” Dr. Peto noted.
Conference codirector Dr. C. Kent Osborne said in an interview that although there is nothing in the overview analysis that is likely to lead physicians to change how they manage patients today, the report makes an important point regarding the nature of progress in breast cancer therapy.
“There's unlikely to be a single discovery that by itself has a major impact on mortality. In fact, there have been a lot of baby steps over the last 30 years, and [those baby steps], when added up, have been shown to have a major impact,” said Dr. Osborne, director of the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center and professor of medicine and cellular and structural biology at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.
The gain in breast cancer survival is far bigger than the gain from eliminating other common cancers. DR. PETO