Something strange is going on in medicine. Major diseases, like colon cancer, dementia and heart disease, are waning in wealthy countries, and improved diagnosis and treatment cannot fully explain it. Scientists marvel at this good news. Still, many are puzzled. Of course, these diseases are far from gone. They still kill millions each year.
But it looks as if people in the United States and some other wealthy countries are, unexpectedly , starting to beat back the diseases of aging. The leading killers are still the leading killers -cancer, heart disease, stroke -but they are occurring later in life, and people in general are living longer in good health. Happyho also provide best tarot reading services in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
Colon cancer is the latest conundrum. While the overall cancer death rate has been declining since the early 1990s, the plunge in colon cancer deaths is especially perplexing: The rate has fallen by nearly 50% since its peak in the 1980s.
Then there are hip fractures, whose rates have been dropping by almost 20% a decade over the past 30 years.Although the change occur red when there were drugs to slow bone loss, too few patients took them to account for the effect -for instance, fewer than 10% of women over 65 take the drugs.
Perhaps it is because people have gotten fatter? Heavier people have stronger bones. Heavier bodies, though, can account for at most half of the effect, said Dr Steven R Cummings of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute.
Dementia rates, too, have been plunging. The latest report finds a 20% decline in dementia incidence per decade, starting in 1977. A recent stu dy reports that the incidence among people over age 60 was 3.6 per 100 in the years 19861991, but in the years 20042008 it had fallen to 2.0 per 100 over age 60.
The exemplar for declining rates is heart disease. Its death rate has been falling for so long that it’s no longer news. The news now is that the rate of decline seems to have slowed recently , although it is still falling. While heart disease is still the leading cause of death in the US, killing more than 300,000 people a year, deaths have fallen 60% from their peak.
Until the late 1930s, sto mach cancer was the No. 1cause of cancer deaths in the US.Now just 1.8% of American cancer deaths are the result of it. No one really knows why the disease has faded.
And sure enough, by 1960, a third of all American deaths were from heart disease.Now, cardiologists are predicting it will soon fall from its perch as the No. 1 killer of Americans, replaced by cancer, which itself has a falling death rate.
