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Wading into troubled waters
This year, Americans at the leading edge of the baby boom generation — born 1946 through 1964 — turn 60. This group includes our two most recent presidents — George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — as well as Cher, Dolly Parton and a host of other well-known individuals and regular folks. In five short years, that first wave of baby boomers will hit 65, the age at which cancer incidence and mortality start to climb.
"The baby boomers are coming into the age when the risk of developing and dying from cancer escalates quite sharply," explains Harmon J. Eyre, M.D., chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
For all cancers combined, the incidence of cancer is 10 times greater for people 65 or older. Older cancer patients are 16 times more likely to die from the disease than their younger counterparts.
By the time the last baby boomers reach 65 in 2030, the number of individuals in the United States who are that age and older is expected to double, from about 35 million to 70 million. By then, the group that is 85 and older is projected to reach about 9.6 million, more than double the number in that age range at the turn of the century.
All this signals a big cancer hit coming down the tracks, with twice as many people expected to get that diagnosis — about 2.6 million — by 2050. But, from a different viewpoint, cancer related to aging is already making an impact.
"Cancer is the leading cause of death among all Americans in the workplace," explains Eyre. The most common cancers start occurring more frequently when people hit 50, he says — just where a large number of the baby boomers are now.
Eyre thinks the synergy of an aging population mixed with the growing cost of health care and the baby boomers hitting Medicare eligibility age may create the proverbial "perfect storm."
"We think it's going to cause the system to collapse," he says, explaining that health care reform and universal insurance coverage need to be addressed to avoid this potential dark scenario. With better access to regular checkups that can help ensure early detection, more cancers can be prevented or found early, when treatment is both cheaper and more successful, he explains.
"We think all Americans have to have health care access," Eyre says.
"I think what we're lacking is just an action plan," observes DuBois, who is an internationally recognized scientist in colon cancer research and the B.F. Byrd Professor of Molecular Oncology at Vanderbilt-Ingram. "I guess the real question is, who should take the lead?"
Traditionally, the federal government has done this job, supporting the war on cancer and other public health efforts by funneling dollars through national agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. But federal funding to fight cancer, which will directly impact one in three Americans, has stalled 25 years after President Richard Nixon led the national charge against this dreaded disease.
The budget proposed by President George Bush for the NIH in fiscal year 2007 was essentially unchanged from the previous year, at $28.6 billion. And the NIH funding slice for the National Cancer Institute — the nation's principal agency for cancer research — is expected to continue to decline, from $4.83 billion in fiscal year 2005 to an anticipated $4.75 billion in fiscal year 2007. When adjusted for inflation, the budgets of both agencies will see a significant drop.
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