Cervical cancer death rates are much higher than thought
USA - The risk of dying from cervical cancer might be much higher than experts previously thought, and women are encouraged to continue recommended cancer screenings.
Black women are dying from cervical cancer at a rate 77% higher than previously thought and white women are dying at a rate 47% higher, according to a new study that published in the journal Cancer on Monday. The study found that previous estimates of cervical cancer death rates didn’t account for women who had their cervixes removed in hysterectomy procedures, which eliminates the risk of developing the cancer. “Prior calculations did not account for hysterectomy because the same general method is used across all cancer statistics,” said Anne Rositch, assistant professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and lead author of the study. That method is to measure cancer’s impact across a total population without accounting for factors outside of gender, she said. There were about 12,990 new cases of cervical cancer in the United States last year and 4,120 cervical cancer deaths, according to the National Cancer Institute. For the study, researchers analyzed data on cervical cancer deaths in the United States, from 2000 to 2012, from the National Center for Health Statistics and the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results databases.
(CNN.COM)