Why Breast Cancer Rates Are Falling
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Condensed from a Washington Post article by Laurie McKinley.
Breast-cancer death rate drops almost 40 percent, saving 322,000 lives, study says.
According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer death rates declined almost 40 percent between 1989 and 2015, averting 322,600 deaths.
Breast cancer death rates increased by 0.4 percent per year from 1975 to 1989, according to the study. After that, mortality rates decreased rapidly, for a 39 percent drop overall through 2015. The report, the latest to document a long-term reduction in breast-cancer mortality, attributed the declines to both improvements in treatments and to early detection by mammography.
Between 2006 and 2015, the study found that death rates decreased for all racial and ethnic groups tracked — non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Hispanics and American Indians/Alaska Natives. But there were substantial variations in mortality between the different groups. Read more
