Reacción a "Reactions: cancer deaths will decrease this year in Europe, but lung cancer deaths in women will rise in Spain"

The study uses mortality data contributed by countries to the WHO database up to 2018. The models used are adequate, although it is not a work of great originality. What they show regarding lung cancer is a known phenomenon and easily visible here in Spain in the interactive mortality server of the National Epidemiology Center, ARIADNA.  

I imagine that, as is the case in our country, in the other countries included in the study there are more current data (here we have real mortality information up to the year 2021) with which the predictions would have less margin of error. The prediction models are more inaccurate the further you extend them forward in time, here they have been extended by five years and in some of the countries by more, as in the case of Italy and France.  

The value of the study is to show the reduction in mortality for most of the tumor sites, also translating it into the number of deaths in the main countries of the European Union and the United Kingdom. Mortality is a complex indicator, because it depends on the frequency of the disease - the main cause of the increase in lung cancer mortality, associated with the epidemic of smoking in women, which has occurred much later than in men - but also on the effect of improvements in early diagnosis and treatment. Overall, therefore, the article shows the success in the fight against these tumors on different fronts and is a wake-up call for the two tumors whose mortality is increasing in women [lung and pancreas].  

Although advances in early diagnosis and better treatments can help in lung cancer, the fight against this tumor, the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, requires, above all, reinforcing efforts to eliminate tobacco consumption, a measure that would also help to reduce the incidence of pancreatic cancer and other tumors and other highly prevalent chronic diseases. The increase in mortality from pancreatic cancer could in part reflect improvements in diagnostic capacity. This is the most lethal tumor for which, as the authors acknowledge, there is still some way to go to improve early diagnosis and treatment.