On November 4, 2003, a doctor gave Jon Gluck some of the worst imaginable news: he had cancer, one that subsequent tests would reveal as multiple myeloma, severe blood cancer and bone marrow.
Jon was told that he could have only 18 months to live. He was 38 years old, a prosperous magazine editor in New York with a 7 -month -old daughter whose third birthday, suddenly realized, could never see.
“At the time after they told me I had cancer, I just said” no, no, no, “Jon told me in an interview last week.” This cannot be true. “
The fact that Jon is still here, talking to me in 2025, tells him that things did not come out in the way in which medical data would have predicted that November morning. He has lived with his cancer, through waves of remission and recurrence, for more than 20 years, an experience that tells with grace and white in his new book An uncertainty exercise. That 7 -month -old daughter is now at university.
You could say that Jon has overcome the chances, and is very aware that Chance played some role in his survival. (“Did you know that ‘Glück’ is German for ‘Luck’?” He writes in the book, pointing out that his good fortune that a random spill on the ice sent him to the doctor first, allowing the issue Joined.
But Jon’s story and his survival demonstrate something that is lost too much: we have changed the course of the war on cancer.
The age adjusted mortality rate in the US for cancer has decreased by approximately one third since 1991, which means that people of a certain age have a third minor risk of dying due to cancer as people of the same age of three decades. That adds up to 4 million less cancer deaths during that period of time. Thanks to the advances in treatments such as the autologous stem cell harvest and the Car-T therapy breaks of which Jon benefited, of time cancer, it is not the death sentence that once was.
Our world in data
Improve all the time
There is no doubt that like the emergence of smoking in the twentieth century, it led to a great increase in cancer deaths, equally acute decrease or tobacco use led to a late decrease. Smoking is one of the most powerful carcinogens in the world, and at the top of the 1960s, around 12 cigarettes per adult were sold. per day In the United States. Remove the cigarettes and, after a delay of a couple of decades, lung cancer deaths fall into other deaths related to smoking without cancer.
But as Saloni Datani wrote in a great piece earlier this year, even before the decline of smoking, the rates of mortality from non -pulmonary cancers in the stomach and the colon had begun to fall. Just as notly, Death Rates for Childhood Cans – which for obvious reasons are not connected to smoking and tend to be caused by genertic mutations – will have significantly faultantly as Well, declineing Sixfold Seafold, Only, for Example, for Example, For Example, For Example, For Examples, For Example Example, for Example, For Example, For Example, For Example, For Example, For Example, For Example, For Example, For Example, For Examples, for Examples, for Examples, for example, for examples, acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived more than five years. Today is more than 90 percent. And the five -year survival rate for all fee increase from 49 percent in the mid -1970s to 69 percent in 2019.
We have strikes the most difficult cancers, such as Jon’s multiple myeloma. Around when Jon was diagnosed, the five -year survival rate was only 34 percent. Today is such high axis 62 percent, and more and more people like Jon live for decades. “There has been a revolution in cancer survival,” Jon told me. “Some diseases now have much more successful therapies than others, but profits are real.”
The dramatic curve in the curve of cancer deaths did not happen by accident: it is the compound interest of three revolutions.
While anti -tabaco policy has been the largest life older, other interventions have helped reduce people’s cancer risk. One of the greatest successes is HPV vaccine. Last year, a study found that cervical cancer mortality rates, which can be caused by HPV infections, in American women from 20 to 39 years old had fallen 62 percent between 2012 and 2021, thanks in large part to the propagation of the vaccine. Other cancers have a leg linked to infections, and there is a strong investigation that indicates that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing the incidence of cancer.
The next revolution is better and previous evaluation. In general, it is true that the previous cancer is caught, the better will be the possibilities of survival, as shown by Jon’s own story. According to a study, affects colorectal cancer in the latest stage in Americans over 50 years of age decreased between 2000 and 2010 in large part due to almost tripled colonoscopies in that same period of time. And the newest detection methods, the use of AI or the use of blood -based tests, could make preliminary detection easier, less invasive and, therefore, more easily available. If the detection of the twentieth century was about finding physical evidence of something bad, the bulge in the detection of the 21 -year -old aims to find cancer before symptoms arise.
The most exciting of all are border developments in the treatment of cancer, much of which can be traced through Jon’s own experience. From drugs such as Lenalidomide and Bortzomib in the 2000s, which helped the double survival of medium myeloma, to the propagation of monoclonal antibodies, real advances in treatments have significantly extended treatments.
Perhaps the most promising development is Car-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Instead of trying to kill cancer directly, immunotherapies turn the patient’s own T cells into guided missiles. In a recent study of 97 patients with multiple myeloma, many of whom faced hospice care, a third of those who recovered CAR-T therapy did not have detectable cancer five years later. It was the son of a result that doctors see.
“Car-t is amazing futuristic-very science fiction,” Jon told me. He underwent his own treatment course with him in mid -2023 and writes that the experience, which put his cancer in a remission in which he is still, left him feeling “physically and metaphysically new.”
While there are still more battles to win in the war on cancer, and there are certain areas, such as growing gastrointestinal cancers among young people, where history is not improving, the future of cancer treatment. For cancer patients such as Jon, that can mean a new challenge: to support the essential uncertainty that comes with living under a disease that is controllable but what could always return.
But surely the alternative exceeds.
“I have reached so completely in my doctors and in these new development,” he said. “I try to remain cautiously optimistic that my future will be in the last 20 years.” And that is more than he or any other person could have expected almost 22 years ago.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News Bulletin. Register here!
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