Prostate Cancer Incidence and Mortality in the United States and the United Kingdom

Extract

Rates of diagnosed prostate cancer have increased substantially in the United States. To provide clues to the impact of screening and other diagnostic procedures on this increase, we compared secular trends in prostate cancer incidence and mortality rates between white men in the United States and men in the United Kingdom, where screening has been less intense (1).

Prostate cancer incidence rates were calculated for the 5-year periods centered approximately on 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990 and for the 3-year period centered on 1993 (data for 1990– 1994 were used for U.K. incidence ates; Fig. 1). For U.S. whites, we used average incidence rates of five Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)¹ regions: Atlanta, Connecticut, Detroit, Iowa, and the San Francisco Bay Area, the only regions providing data for all of these periods (2–5). For the British, we used cancer registry data from the Birmingham and West Midlands region (2) (all races; data for 1990–1994 provided by L. Somervaille: personal communication). Prostate cancer mortality rates were calculated for the same time periods for U.S. whites and for England and Wales (all races), respectively (6–9). All rates were adjusted to the age distribution of the world standard population by the direct method. We found similar trends, regardless of whether all age groups were included or rates were restricted to men aged younger than 75 years, so we present only trends based on all age groups.