Each year, 12,000 lives are saved thanks to mammography. And thousands more could be saved with the proper screenings, says the CDC. Are you up to date on your breast and colon cancer screenings?

WASHINGTON – At least 10,000 people and possibly far more die in the United States each year because they have not been screened for colon or breast cancer, according to a government report released on Tuesday.

But more people are being screened than ever before, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in the first of a series of new reports on health statistics.

“We are encouraged by a significant increase in colon cancer screening rates over recent years,” the CDC Director told reporters in a telephone briefing.

But, he added, “more than a third of Americans who need to be screened haven’t been screened.”

CDC researchers analyzed survey results from the state-level 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey for the report, available at http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns.

They found colon cancer screening rates rose from 52 percent of those who should get the tests in 2002 to 63 percent in 2008. Americans are advised to get a colon cancer screen, usually in the form of a colonoscopy, starting at age 50 and at age 40 if there is a family history of the disease. 

A separate report found that 81 percent of women aged 50 to 74 got mammograms in 2008, virtually the same as in 2006.

“The findings indicated that more than 22 million men and women have not had a potentially life-saving screening test for colorectal cancer and about 7 million women age 50 to 74 have not had a recent mammogram,” the CDC said in a statement.

“Any screening is good and the overall increase is the main message there,” Frieden said. “Nevertheless, there is a lot more progress we could make with colon cancer screening.”

The CDC said there are differences of opinion over how many lives could have been saved by early screening. Colonoscopies can detect and remove pre-cancerous growths before they become tumors and mammograms can catch tumors while they are small and easily removed.

LIVES SAVED

The American Cancer Society says that more than 106,000 Americans were diagnosed with colon cancer in 2009 and nearly 50,000 died of it.

What is debated is exactly how many of those would be prevented by colon cancer screening getting as high as can plausibly be expected.

“You can argue for 10,000. You can argue for 30,000,” he added. “I think we can certainly say more than 10,000 very comfortably. For every person who dies from preventable colon cancer it is one too many.”

In 2009, 194,000 Americans got breast cancer and 40,000 died. Each year about 12,000 lives are saved as a result of mammography.

If insurance companies stopped requiring co-payments for screening tests, that could help increase the number of people willing to be screened, the CDC said.

The report also showed that people with health insurance are far more likely to be screened for cancer, with 66 percent of those insured getting the recommended breast or colon screening compared to 36 percent of those without.

Currently, about 46 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population, has no health insurance. A new healthcare law signed in March is projected to extend coverage to 32 million more Americans, mainly by requiring them to buy it.

The cost of treating cancer in the United States nearly doubled over the past two decades, but expensive cancer drugs may not be the main reason why, according to a surprising new study.

The study confounds conventional wisdom in several respects. The soaring price of new cancer treatments has received widespread attention, but the researchers conclude that rising costs were mainly driven by the growing number of cancer patients.

The study also finds cancer accounts for only 5 percent of total U.S. medical costs, and that has not changed in the last few decades.

“I will say I’m a bit surprised,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society, who said he would have expected the proportion of cancer costs to rise.

The researchers also found that private insurers now cover a greater share of cancer treatment costs — about 50 percent — while patients’ out-of-pocket costs have fallen over the past two decades.

Though taken aback by some of the findings, Lichtenfeld and other experts did not dispute the study, which compared medical cost data from the late 1980s to that of the early 2000s. But they said the picture surely has changed in the last several years.

The study is being called the first to combine national cancer costs for all types of payers and see how they’ve changed over time. The figures are reported in 2007 dollars.

It found that cancer treatment costs rose from nearly $25 billion in 1987 to more than $48 billion by the end of 2005.

The rise in costs is mainly due to an increase over 20 years in how many cancer patients there are, said the study’s lead author, Florence Tangka of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The researchers used data from national telephone surveys done in 1987 and from 2001 through 2005, which gathered information on medical conditions as well as who paid the bills. More than 164,000 people were surveyed.

The study did not offer precise estimates of how the number of people treated for cancer changed from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. But it showed dramatic increases in the number of cancer cases covered by the government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. Medicare, which covers the elderly and disabled, has consistently covered about a third of the nation’s cancer costs. Medicaid accounts for only 3 percent.

The U.S. population is aging, and older people tend to get cancer at higher rates, Tangka noted.

Better and more advanced treatments mean more people with cancer are remaining alive, so the spending increases represent money well spent, said Kenneth Thorpe, a health policy researcher at Emory University who has focused on the cost of health care.

“It seems like we’re buying increases in survival,” Thorpe said.

The study is being published in Cancer, a medical journal of the American Cancer Society.

The researchers also found:

_The percentage of cancer costs from inpatient hospital care fell from 64 percent to about 27 percent. A shift to less expensive outpatient care, along with cost containment efforts by large health insurers, helped keep down increases in the costs per patient, the authors said.

_The proportion of cancer costs paid by private insurance rose from 42 to 50 percent.

_The proportion of costs paid out of pocket by patients — including copayments and deductibles — dropped from 17 percent to 8 percent.

Those last two findings surprised some experts.

Recent government reports have found that the percentage of Americans with private health insurance has been shrinking and recently hit its lowest mark in 50 years. Yet the study found that the proportion of cancer treatment costs paid by private insurance rose.

And companies have been tightening or cutting employee benefits, causing out-of-pocket costs to go up for many patients. Yet the study found that the proportion of bills paid by patients declined.

That last finding in particular was striking, said Lichtenfeld, the cancer society’s deputy chief medical officer.

He alluded to widely reported increases in personal bankruptcies prompted by medical bills. “There’s no question that the out-of-pocket costs for some patients have risen dramatically,” Lichtenfeld said.

The rising price of certain treatments also should be acknowledged, he said.

The challenge of rising prices was recognized by American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), which last year released its first guidelines counseling cancer doctors on how to talk to patients about deciding between less expensive chemotherapy drugs made more sense than newer, more expensive products.

The study did not add in the cost of diagnostic tests and scans, which are cost drivers. And the data does not include the last five years, which saw some extremely pricey cancer drugs come on the market.

The picture may have changed since the study’s data was collected and the U.S. economy deteriorated, said Dr. Neal Meropol, a Case Western Reserve University cancer expert who worked on the ASCO guidelines.

Newer treatments along with wider testing are driving up the overall cost of cancer care, Meropol said.

“My concern is that costs are getting shifted to patients and there is a potential for increasing disparities” in cancer care, he added.

Scientists are puzzling over a surprising increase in stomach cancer in young white adults, while rates in all other American adults have declined. Chances for developing stomach cancer are still very low in young adults but the incidence among 25 to 39 year old whites nonetheless climbed by almost 70 percent in the past three decades, a study found.

National Cancer Institute researchers and colleagues examined new cases from 1977 to 2006 of cancer in the lower stomach, which can be caused by chronic infection with a common bacteria called H. pylori. It also causes stomach ulcers.

Overall, there were 39,003 cases detected in a surveillance program that covers about one-fourth of the U.S. population.

These included only 734 white young adults, but their incidence rate climbed from .54 per 200,000 to about 1 per 200,000.

Among white adults aged 25 to age 84, the rate declined from almost 12 per 200,000 to 8 per 200,000; among black adults it declined from about 27 per 200,000 to 19 per 200,000.

Rates also declined for other races, which weren’t specified.

A digestive cancer specialist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said the increase in young white adults is surprising but not alarming. The specialist, who was not involved in the research, said it could be a statistical blip but that it needs to be investigated.

The study appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association. It focused on lower stomach cancer, not cancer of the upper stomach, which has been linked with gastric reflux. Together, these cancers are the fourth most common type of cancer worldwide.

In U.S. men, stomach cancer is among the top 10 most common cancers in blacks, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians. It’s also among the most common cancers in Asian-American women.

Lower stomach cancer has been linked with diets high in salt and salt-preserved foods, and low in fresh fruits and vegetables; its incidence historically has been higher in Asia and other countries where this type of food preservation is more common.

But stomach cancer rates have been declining in many countries because of improved food preservation and better hygiene, which decreases risks for H. pylori infection, so the overall U.S. decline was expected, said the National Cancer Institute.

However, the researchers noted that salt intake has increased among Americans of all ages, and said they will be investigating whether changes in eating habits explain the rise in young adults.

H. pylori prevalence might have increased in young adults, or there may be some other unknown bacteria that could play a role, although those theories remain unproven.

Veteran Training suggests following the simple rule of thumb and eat a healthy, balanced diet of unprocessed foods.