Part of the problem is that prostate cancer is, often times, the sort of cancer you live with rather than the sort that kills you, no matter what ends up on the death certificate, because a) something else you are also suffering from will get you first and b) by the time you get it you are too old to be a candidate for certain aggressive treatments, and c) the reduced quality of life you can get as a result of the treatments makes many patients decide it is not worth it. But breast and ovarian cancer are mostly diagnosed in otherwise healthy young women, which makes it something you nearly always want to treat.
The problem is 1) if it was the other way around, nobody would accept this argument and 2) breast cancer is also already very easy to treat and has a correspondingly high survival rate. Tbh in my view it's more that breast cancer is overfunded rather than that prostate is underfunded.
Ummm, once again, the post is about research not treatment. I get that you feel no further research is needed. You already effectively said that in your first comment.
Surely though you would like to know what you can do to avoid (or at least dramatic reduce the chance) of a cancer developing in you? Or do you think it is just down to bad luck? And if a cancer has established wouldn't you like to know how to forestall its further development?
It's not that I think that no research is _needed_, but that I think that the resources allocated to research a problem has a pretty strong relationship with whether finding something is likely to result in a treatment. There are all sorts of people interested in doing general cancer research about the general causes of cancer, and how to precent it and how to prevent it from reoccurring and that's good. And some of it, to the best of our knowledge really is just chance, bad luck, and nothing you could have done, and that is another good thing to discover since blaming people for their cancers is a real thing.
But in figuring out how much money you should allocate to general cancer research, and how much on cancers that effect the female reproductive system, and how much on those that effect the male reproductive system, you should dump more money into testicular
cancer (which mostly effects young men, who really need to have it treated) as opposed to prostate cancer, which often times isn't going to be treated no matter what you discover. This is one of the reasons why testicular cancer has gone from a thing that was particularly deadly to something that is now nearly always cured.
Speaking of bad luck -- some of the bad luck you can have is to be born with certain genetic combinations, and people are studying this. But while we have found plenty of combinations which lead to overwhelming odds of getting breast cancer -- which leads people to look for even more of them, and find them -- we haven't found such a thing for prostate cancer. Some people have genes we think predispose them to cancers in general, and prostate cancer is one of the things that they can get, but that is not the same thing.
This means that the underlying cause of 'why is there less prostate cancer research compared to breast cancer' is unlikely to be -- because the funds are misallocated, the sexist researchers don't care enough about men!. It could be that rather too much money is being allocated to breast cancer research at the present. Breast cancer sufferers seem to be better at fundraising for breast cancer than Prostate cancer sufferers are at fundraising for prostate cancer .. they are more visible at any rate.
But in the theoretical case where the funds are perfectly allocated, I think that we would still see more money being allocated to breast cancer than to prostate cancer.
Rather than making a snarky comment, perhaps you would have been better received if you had asked if the difference in research funding between breast and prostrate cancers was because the predominance of the funding was for research into treatment? And then made your point that breast cancer affected much younger people than prostrate cancers.
I assume you are correct that there is a stronger correlation between genetics and getting cancer of the breast than for prostrate cancer. That's pretty interesting as it suggests that the origins of prostrate cancer are comparatively environmental (yes, I know it might just be that evolution hasn't selected out cancers of old age). So there is a research question: what is the cause of differential rates of prostrate cancer (among old men)?
Any snarkiness you heard was in your own head. Current theory is that the origin of most cancers in the very old has nothing to do with any cause at all. We're all getting cancerous cells, all the time. This is normal, and happens at random. (Of course you might have some non-random reasons to get cancerous cells, too, but even if you removed every single one of those, you'd still be generating cancerous cells.) But our immune system notices them and gets rid of them. They are all removed before they ever get around to forming tumours, etc.
The interesting question is why does this ability not protect us from cancers all the time? Why do we ever get cancer at all? One factor is that this ability declines with age, so people get cancers more, and respond to treatment less well. But cancers also seem to be in an arms race with the human immune system, where we are finding ones that are simply better at hiding from the immune system. This could be survivorship bias, in that these are pretty fascinating things to study, while ones that cannot hide are, from a research point of view, comparatively boring. But it may be evolution at work, which is a plus for those who espouse the 'viral origins of cancer' theory.
First, as Laura Creighton noted, the age at which people are impacted is another consideration besides the raw number of deaths. There is data on estimated years of life lost (https://progressreport.cancer.gov/end/life_lost). They estimate in 2022 that breast cancer deaths caused the loss of 710K years of life, ovarian cancer 221K years, corpus & uterus cancer 204K years, cervix uteri cancer 98K years, and prostate cancer 311K years. While breast cancer kills only slightly more people than prostate cancer, it is eliminating over twice as many person-years.
Second, it looks like breast cancer is the main outlier driving much of your results, and this is not surprising to me. In the US, breast cancer awareness is a huge movement that gets lots of attention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness). People wear pink ribbons, there's lots of advertising and corporate sponsorship, they even try to tap into sex appeal by selling "I heart boobies" merch. I don't think any other disease has anywhere close to the same PR campaign and lobbying effort. Looking at your results, it doesn't look like there is a strong systematic bias towards funding female cancers in general, mostly just breast cancer in particular, likely as a result of successful campaigning.
When you look at funding per years of life lost by cancer type, you get 0.19 $M/1k yrs for breast cancer, 0.14 $M/1k yrs for ovarian cancer, and 0.13 $M/1k yrs for prostate cancer. Your funding dataset does not mention uterine cancer at all, which is a major killer, so I'm guessing it is merged under the cervical cancer heading, which would yield 0.08 $M/1k yrs (otherwise it would be 0.23 $M/1k yrs for cervical cancer and 0 $M/1k yrs for uterine cancer, which would seem odd). So it looks like breast cancer is a large outlier, whereas prostate cancer is at a similar level of funding to ovarian cancer and well above cervical/uterine cancer.
Bingo! Life years lost (or gained) is “where it’s at” and the variable I’d be most interested in. My prostate cancer may take me (and many others) out at 80, but is that really a societal loss of great priority? How many young mothers with breast cancer is that worth? Probably none. And yeah, I’m an old guy….
Death rate *is* a more meaningful variable than cases since it accounts for risk to life. The death rate you found for ‘male’ cancers (chiefly prostate) is about half the rate for ‘female’ cancers (chiefly breast). Hence, the factor-of-three funding ratio is not so far out of line.
Part of the problem is that prostate cancer is, often times, the sort of cancer you live with rather than the sort that kills you, no matter what ends up on the death certificate, because a) something else you are also suffering from will get you first and b) by the time you get it you are too old to be a candidate for certain aggressive treatments, and c) the reduced quality of life you can get as a result of the treatments makes many patients decide it is not worth it. But breast and ovarian cancer are mostly diagnosed in otherwise healthy young women, which makes it something you nearly always want to treat.
The problem is 1) if it was the other way around, nobody would accept this argument and 2) breast cancer is also already very easy to treat and has a correspondingly high survival rate. Tbh in my view it's more that breast cancer is overfunded rather than that prostate is underfunded.
Moreover, its diagnosis is rather trivial: PSA test. In fact, it is so efficent it is usually diagnosed so early therapies are not even required.
The numbers are for research funding, not funding of treatment.
yes, but why fund research on things you won't end up wanting to use as a treatment anyway?
Ummm, once again, the post is about research not treatment. I get that you feel no further research is needed. You already effectively said that in your first comment.
Surely though you would like to know what you can do to avoid (or at least dramatic reduce the chance) of a cancer developing in you? Or do you think it is just down to bad luck? And if a cancer has established wouldn't you like to know how to forestall its further development?
It's not that I think that no research is _needed_, but that I think that the resources allocated to research a problem has a pretty strong relationship with whether finding something is likely to result in a treatment. There are all sorts of people interested in doing general cancer research about the general causes of cancer, and how to precent it and how to prevent it from reoccurring and that's good. And some of it, to the best of our knowledge really is just chance, bad luck, and nothing you could have done, and that is another good thing to discover since blaming people for their cancers is a real thing.
But in figuring out how much money you should allocate to general cancer research, and how much on cancers that effect the female reproductive system, and how much on those that effect the male reproductive system, you should dump more money into testicular
cancer (which mostly effects young men, who really need to have it treated) as opposed to prostate cancer, which often times isn't going to be treated no matter what you discover. This is one of the reasons why testicular cancer has gone from a thing that was particularly deadly to something that is now nearly always cured.
Speaking of bad luck -- some of the bad luck you can have is to be born with certain genetic combinations, and people are studying this. But while we have found plenty of combinations which lead to overwhelming odds of getting breast cancer -- which leads people to look for even more of them, and find them -- we haven't found such a thing for prostate cancer. Some people have genes we think predispose them to cancers in general, and prostate cancer is one of the things that they can get, but that is not the same thing.
This means that the underlying cause of 'why is there less prostate cancer research compared to breast cancer' is unlikely to be -- because the funds are misallocated, the sexist researchers don't care enough about men!. It could be that rather too much money is being allocated to breast cancer research at the present. Breast cancer sufferers seem to be better at fundraising for breast cancer than Prostate cancer sufferers are at fundraising for prostate cancer .. they are more visible at any rate.
But in the theoretical case where the funds are perfectly allocated, I think that we would still see more money being allocated to breast cancer than to prostate cancer.
Rather than making a snarky comment, perhaps you would have been better received if you had asked if the difference in research funding between breast and prostrate cancers was because the predominance of the funding was for research into treatment? And then made your point that breast cancer affected much younger people than prostrate cancers.
I assume you are correct that there is a stronger correlation between genetics and getting cancer of the breast than for prostrate cancer. That's pretty interesting as it suggests that the origins of prostrate cancer are comparatively environmental (yes, I know it might just be that evolution hasn't selected out cancers of old age). So there is a research question: what is the cause of differential rates of prostrate cancer (among old men)?
Any snarkiness you heard was in your own head. Current theory is that the origin of most cancers in the very old has nothing to do with any cause at all. We're all getting cancerous cells, all the time. This is normal, and happens at random. (Of course you might have some non-random reasons to get cancerous cells, too, but even if you removed every single one of those, you'd still be generating cancerous cells.) But our immune system notices them and gets rid of them. They are all removed before they ever get around to forming tumours, etc.
The interesting question is why does this ability not protect us from cancers all the time? Why do we ever get cancer at all? One factor is that this ability declines with age, so people get cancers more, and respond to treatment less well. But cancers also seem to be in an arms race with the human immune system, where we are finding ones that are simply better at hiding from the immune system. This could be survivorship bias, in that these are pretty fascinating things to study, while ones that cannot hide are, from a research point of view, comparatively boring. But it may be evolution at work, which is a plus for those who espouse the 'viral origins of cancer' theory.
A couple of considerations:
First, as Laura Creighton noted, the age at which people are impacted is another consideration besides the raw number of deaths. There is data on estimated years of life lost (https://progressreport.cancer.gov/end/life_lost). They estimate in 2022 that breast cancer deaths caused the loss of 710K years of life, ovarian cancer 221K years, corpus & uterus cancer 204K years, cervix uteri cancer 98K years, and prostate cancer 311K years. While breast cancer kills only slightly more people than prostate cancer, it is eliminating over twice as many person-years.
Second, it looks like breast cancer is the main outlier driving much of your results, and this is not surprising to me. In the US, breast cancer awareness is a huge movement that gets lots of attention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer_awareness). People wear pink ribbons, there's lots of advertising and corporate sponsorship, they even try to tap into sex appeal by selling "I heart boobies" merch. I don't think any other disease has anywhere close to the same PR campaign and lobbying effort. Looking at your results, it doesn't look like there is a strong systematic bias towards funding female cancers in general, mostly just breast cancer in particular, likely as a result of successful campaigning.
When you look at funding per years of life lost by cancer type, you get 0.19 $M/1k yrs for breast cancer, 0.14 $M/1k yrs for ovarian cancer, and 0.13 $M/1k yrs for prostate cancer. Your funding dataset does not mention uterine cancer at all, which is a major killer, so I'm guessing it is merged under the cervical cancer heading, which would yield 0.08 $M/1k yrs (otherwise it would be 0.23 $M/1k yrs for cervical cancer and 0 $M/1k yrs for uterine cancer, which would seem odd). So it looks like breast cancer is a large outlier, whereas prostate cancer is at a similar level of funding to ovarian cancer and well above cervical/uterine cancer.
Bingo! Life years lost (or gained) is “where it’s at” and the variable I’d be most interested in. My prostate cancer may take me (and many others) out at 80, but is that really a societal loss of great priority? How many young mothers with breast cancer is that worth? Probably none. And yeah, I’m an old guy….
Prostate cancer tends to come at a later age so fewer years of life lost.
But I'm seriously thinking (having no heirs) about leaving a large amount of my leftover dough at the end of life to prostate cancer research.
It's not so much that prostate cancer tends to come at a later age as that it grows really slowly. It tends to start pretty early.
My Cancer Reversal podcast series:
Part 1:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-21-cancer-reversal-pt-1-sodium-dff?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo
Part 2:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-23-cancer-reversal-pt-2-electricity-c0d?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo
Part 3:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-26-cancer-reversal-pt-3-mind-0d2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo
Part 4:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-28-cancer-reversal-pt-4-cold-d8f?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo
Part 5:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-30-cancer-reversal-pt-5-avoid-900?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo
Part 6:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-34-cancer-reversal-pt-6-add-924?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo
Bonus:
Link to cancer cure documentary:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/fyi-documentaries-cancer-the-forbidden?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=31s3eo
Hey Emil O. W. Kirkegaard I tried emailing you a question and it didn't work. You might have asked you here.
Death rate *is* a more meaningful variable than cases since it accounts for risk to life. The death rate you found for ‘male’ cancers (chiefly prostate) is about half the rate for ‘female’ cancers (chiefly breast). Hence, the factor-of-three funding ratio is not so far out of line.
Why did you use both new_cases_male_pct and new_cases_per_year:new_cases_male_pct in your regression?
The other is the interaction, which makes the slope not fixed.