cancer awareness

October is breast cancer awareness month. Most people know this already and most people probably also know someone who has had breast cancer. I have at least one close relative who has battled through this form of cancer over the last few years, and had to endure multiple operations as a result. I think we can all agree that breast cancer is life-threatening, devastating to its victims, and absolutely a bad thing. What has bothered me a little in the past, though, is that many of the other cancers do not get the same level of attention and funding that breast cancer gets.

As an example, prostate cancer kills roughly 80% the number of people in the United States every year that breast cancer kills yet it does not receive anywhere near 80% the attention or funding for research that breast cancer receives (prostate cancer incidences, breast cancer incidences). Products all over the grocery store aren't sold in blue packages during prostate awareness month (September, by the way) with proceeds going to research prostate cancer. According to a New York Times article from last year regarding government funding for cancer research, prostate cancer is actually the most common of the cancers, but lung and breast cancers do account for more deaths. Funding is very skewed toward breast cancer when compared to other cancers by almost every measure, however.

A cynical part of me wants to believe that part of the reason that other cancers do not get the attention that breast cancer gets is that our society is obsessed with breasts. In reality, though, I think the modern focus on breasts more of an impact in how difficult the cancer is for the victim to deal with rather than on the attention that is given to it. It would be absurd to suggest that even a significant minority of people who participate in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, for example, do so because they care about one part of the human anatomy more than another. However, there are almost certainly people who participate because of fear or self-image issues a loved one had to deal with due to a mastectomy.

One reason that someone could probably give for all of the focus on breast cancer relative to the other cancers is that it is one type of cancer that can be caught and treated early. I believe that prostate cancer* is probably more important in this regard, though, because men are statistically much less likely to go to their doctors about medical problems they are having than women are. I also suspect that women are statistically much more likely to worry about getting cancer, so they are less likely to need to be made aware that they should be checking for abnormalities that could indicate cancer. If awareness is the goal, it would seem to me that an awareness campaign focused on getting men who weren't going to do so to have their prostates examined would be more effective than one to get women who weren't going to do so to check their breasts for abnormalities.

While I do not know this to be true, I suspect that the focus that breast cancer gets is because it is something unpredictable and scary that affects a large percentage of people's mothers and sisters. If my dad got cancer it would be a very big deal, but he would not talk to the rest of my family about it much simply because most men do not cope by talking things out. Whatever he goes through he does it in silence. By contrast, if my mom got cancer she would cope by talking about it, even though she is not normally much of a talker. I think the constant conversations within families impacted by breast cancer motivates people to take steps to do something about such a devastating disease. Families of men with prostate cancer probably do not talk about it as much, and so they are probably motivated to become active in finding a cure for or raising awareness about this form of cancer. I suspect that this accounts for much of the attention and research funding disparity between the cancers.

In the end I am not trying to say that giving attention to breast cancer and encouraging people to take steps to catch early is a bad thing. I just believe that we should be careful not to focus only on the one type of cancer and neglect awareness and research efforts for the others.

* Update (10/21/2009): I found out this past week that the official guidelines on at least one of the prostate cancer tests recommend not getting the test because the level of cancer found is rarely significant, and the treatments are often worse than the cure. This kind of damages part of my argument, so I felt obliged to add a note about it.