Cancer Now Leads Heart Disease As State’s Leading Cause Of Death
A new federal report finds that cancer causes more deaths than heart disease in California and 21 other states, a change from 2000 when that was the case in only two states.
LA Times:
Cancer Surpasses Heart Disease To Become The Leading Cause Of Death In California And 21 Other States
Cancer has surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death in California and 21 other states, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That total is in stark contrast to the situation at the start of this century, when only two states — Alaska and Minnesota — lost more people to cancer than heart disease. And it’s a huge departure from the situation in the 1950s, when the number of heart disease deaths was 2½ times bigger than the number of cancer fatalities. (Kaplan, 8/24)
STAT:
Cancer Therapy Holds Great Promise — But At Great Cost
[Karen] Koehler was undergoing a promising — and terrifying — experimental therapy that her oncologists hoped could rid her body of cancer entirely. It’s called CAR-T therapy, and it works by engineering the patient’s own immune cells to attack cancer. ... The treatment induces such sudden and severe side effects that it can take a small army of top specialists to keep patients alive while their newly engineered immune systems attack their cancer cells. The result: CAR-T remains so risky, so complex, and so difficult to manage that experts warn it’ll be years before it’s available to most patients who would stand to benefit — even though two drug makers, startup Kite Pharma and pharmaceutical giant Novartis, are racing to get their versions of the therapy approved by the the Food and Drug Administration as early as next year. (Keshavan, 8/23)