On the occasion of International Cancer Day, the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization published the global outlook for cancer. According to the data, in the year 2040 around 2.43 million men around the world will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, which is the most common malignancy among men, compared to the number of patients today, which is approximately 1.4 million.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization predicts that 5,254 Israeli men will get sick in Israel in 2040 with prostate cancer, whose number today in 2023 is about 2,600 men. So that in fact within 17 years the number of prostate cancer patients in Israel will double. According to data from the Ministry of Health, prostate cancer accounts for about 21% of all invasive tumors among Jewish men, about 11% among Arab men, and about 8.4% of the causes of cancer death among men.
In addition, according to the data, in 2040 around the world about 740 thousand men will die from prostate cancer and in Israel in 2040 about 1,070 Israelis will die. As of today, according to the data of the World Health Organization, about 375 thousand men die of prostate cancer in the world, and according to the data of the Cancer Society, about 530 men died in Israel in the last year.
At the same time, scientific data indicate the existence of a trend of decreasing mortality from cancer in general in the era of early diagnosis. It should be noted that only recently, the Ministry of Health approved a revolutionary blood test for accurately predicting the presence of aggressive prostate cancer which dramatically improves the early detection process of patients. The blood test is called IsoPSA and makes it possible to save over 50% of the biopsies thanks to the exact decoding technology which identifies the change in the protein structure that results exclusively from a cancerous tumor.
Prof. Ofer Nativ, a senior urologist at Elisha Hospital, former director of the urology department at Bnei Zion Medical Center, who serves as a consultant for the test, explains that: “Thanks to the predictive ability of the test, we can predict the presence of aggressive prostate cancer and spare the patient a painful biopsy. Therefore, every man in Israel who has A PSA level over 4, he is over 50 and his urologist is already considering a biopsy, it is very important to check compatibility with the IsoPSA test, which has proven reliability and accuracy. Thanks to its clear answer, we urologists only send for a biopsy those men with a result that suggests the presence of aggressive prostate cancer.”