Over the past 20 years, deaths from bladder cancer in adults in the United States have slowly gone down because doctors now have better ways to find and treat the disease. However, differences in sex, race and geographic region still influence who is more likely to die from bladder cancer, according to a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Oncology.
Bladder cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in the United States. In this study, researchers looked at national data from 1999 to 2020 to understand how bladder cancer death rates changed over time in U.S. adults and to see if there were differences in death rates between different groups of people.
During these years, 319,229 adults died from bladder cancer. The number of deaths per 100,000 people went down from about 6.7 in 1999 to about 6.2 in 2020. The drop became faster after 2016, when new treatments started to be used.
One important type of treatment approved in 2017 — immune checkpoint inhibitors such as pembrolizumab — helped patients with advanced bladder cancer to live longer.
Read more about bladder cancer treatment and care
The study also found clear differences between groups. Men died from bladder cancer more often than women. White patients had the highest recorded death rate, but this may be because bladder cancer is underdiagnosed in other racial groups.
People living in the Northeast had higher death rates than other regions, and people in rural areas also had slightly higher death rates than those living in cities.
“This study revealed the complex transformations in bladder cancer mortality in the United States over the past two decades,” the researchers said. “While the overall trend shows improvement, persistent deep-rooted health inequalities cannot be ignored.”
They believe future work should focus on early testing, helping people to stop smoking and making sure high-risk groups get proper treatment.
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