Obviously
cancer is deadly. It is a disease
that attacks the cells in our body and creates mutations that make its own
cells immortal, but is dying from cancer the only worry that cancer patients
should have? Based on the article, Non-cancer mortality among people diagnosed with cancer, we see a trend in
the deaths of cancer patients versus non-cancer patients, and notice that the
higher death rate among people with cancer is not always necessarily due to
cancer. So why do cancer patients
have a much higher chance of dying from a non-cancer related mortality? What does this say about lifestyles,
health related issues, and even psychological aspects of the disease?
In
this study, done in Queensland, Australia, Peter Baade, Lin Fritschi, and
Elizabeth Eakin examine and compare death records of cancer patients and a
control group without cancer, to study how and why they died. The results were astounding, showing
that compared to the general non-cancer population, cancer patients were 50%
more likely to die of non-cancer causes.
To find these statistics, only non-cancer causes of death with at least
100 deaths over the period of the study were used. To consider a death to be non-cancer related, it must not be
directly related to cancer treatment (such as dying during surgery) but could
be indirectly related to a type of treatment based on its long-term
effects. The types of cancer that
had the most noticeable mortality rates also differed greatly. Breast cancer and melanoma patients did
not differ significantly from the general population, but people with lung
cancer had the highest rate of non-cancer related deaths.
There
are multiple theories as to why cancer patients have a higher rate of
non-cancer related fatalities, but they aren’t necessarily mutually
exclusive. The first is the side
effects of cancer treatments (again, only indirectly related treatment options
would be counted) could cause another condition. Second could be that instead of cancer leading to another
condition, a patient with a non-cancer condition could get extensive and
invasive testing involving the diagnosis and treatment, which then leads to the
subsequent diagnosis of cancer.
Third could be the representativeness of the general population in the
cancer population. It is shown
that cancers with the lowest death rate such as breast cancer and melanoma are
associated with a very affluent population in Australia, giving them the means
to get effective treatment options.
Fourth is that the factors that cause cancer could also be the same
factors that cause the non-cancer related death. Cigarette smoke causes lung cancer (associated with the
highest rate of non-cancer deaths), but is also responsible for other deadly
conditions such as heart disease, pulmonary disease, and stroke. This seems like one of the most likely
reasons for the increased death rate in cancer patients because of the many
factors that can cause cancer.
One
other factor that I would have liked to look at in this study would be the
psychological effects that cancer patients have, which could also lead to other
forms of death. It is shown that
people with increased happiness and a higher self-evaluated quality of life
could possibly live longer than those with a bleak outlook. This could confirm why cancer patients
have a larger overall non-cancer death rate, if there is a chance that
diagnosis gave them a more pessimistic view on life as well as why those
cancers with a high survival rate such as breast cancer and melanoma, also have
a decreased non-cancer death rate.
In addition, the figure shows the rate of suicide, possibly correlating
with this psychological aspect.
The rate is low for high-survival cancers but high for low-survival rate
ones such as lung cancer.
