By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
The number of cancer patients in Seoul is rising but their death rate is decreasing, according to recent statistics.
It is a result of early diagnosis and the development of new treatment regimes.
The number of men living in Seoul who had cancer was 284.5 per 100,000 people in 1993, rising by 4.4 to 288.9 in 2002, according to the National Statistical Office and Seoul City.
But the number of male citizens who died of cancer dropped by 40.9 from 210.5 to 169.6 during the corresponding period.
The expectancy is the same for women: the number of female Seoulites who contracted cancer was 175.5 per 100,000 in 1993, increasing by 22.3 to 197.8 in 2002.
However, the cancer-linked death rate fell by 22.9 from 98.1 to 75.2 during the same period.
``Specific kinds of cancers are increasing due to changes in life style. But the death rate is falling as more and more cancer patients recover from the disease thanks to diagnosis at an early stage and developments in medical science,'' said Ahn Yoon-ok, a preventive medicine professor at Seoul National University.
The data shows how important early diagnosis of cancer is in fighting the disease, Ahn said.
The number of breast cancer patients rose from 21.1 per 100,000 female Seoulites to 34.1, while that of woman thyroid cancer patients jumped from 7.7 to 19.1. But the death rate of the two diseases dropped: from 7.4 to 3.6 for breast cancer and from 1 to 0.9 for thyroid cancer.
Some 12 men out of 100,000 had large intestine cancer in 1993 with the number increasing to 20.3 in 2002, while the number of male Seoul citizens having rectal cancer rose from 13.4 to 20.2. The number of deaths for large intestine cancer slightly increased from 7 to 7.7, but that for rectal cancer dropped from 8.2 to 7.6 during the same period.
The incidence is decreasing in the case of men's stomach, liver and lung cancers and women's stomach and cervical cancers _ that of liver and cervical cancers are expected to drop further as vaccination for hepatitis, one of the main causes of liver cancer, has become more common and a vaccine against cervical cancer has been developed.
Seoul authorities produced the data by checking cancer patients registered at cancer registry centers in the metropolitan area one by one. The city recently applied for authorization of the data to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an affiliate of the World Health Organization.