A common line I see posted on feminist blogs/subreddits is that prostate cancer isn't particularly serious or deadly, because most men with prostate cancer die from something else. "Men don't die OF prostate cancer, they die WITH it", it's often said.

Unfortunately, this isn't true and is a misunderstanding of mathematics and the disease. In reality, prostate cancer kills a very high number of men, even in relatively younger ages, relative to other cancers. It's the secondest highest cancer killer of men, and the biggest cancer killer of non-smoking men.

They mortality rate is low because it's such a common cancer, there are a lot of slow growing and relatively benign cases, which skew the mean. The more aggressive forms are, it's true, in the minority- however, because there are so many cases of prostate cancer, this minority still turns out to be a large number. The same is true for men dying in the younger age bracket- while the majority of prostate cancer deaths happen in men 75 or older, the number of men dying in the younger age bracket is still high relative to other cancers.

Think of it this way- what's more, 10% of 100 or 80% 100?

10% of 1000 is 100.

80% of 100 is 80.

80% of higher than 10%, but in this case, the 10% is more because its 10% of a larger number.

So let's look at the latest statistics from the United states.

http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html

If you scroll down, you see a box titled "Number of new cases and deaths." That you can click to expand. You can see there will be an estimated 29,840 deaths. If you scroll down, you see a chart showing what ages deaths occur. Now, the median age of death is 80, but that doesn't quite tell the whole story. Let's look at the chart.

8.5% of deaths happened between 55-64. So, 8.5% of 29,840 is 2536 deaths. So 2536 deaths between the ages of 55-64.

Now, let's compare to Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/nhl.html

We can see that non-hodgkin lymphoma has 18990 deaths, and keep in mind, both men AND women get lymphoma, so that 18990 is split between two (although the male mortality rate is 70% higher. http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/nhl.html )

So if we take the 55-64 bracket, we take 14.4% of 18900 and get 2735...almost the same....AND a big chunk of that is women.

So in the the 55-64 age bracket, prostate cancer kills more men than non-hodkins lymphoma does.

So, let's go to the 65-74 age bracket. For prostate cancer, it's 20.1% of deaths. 20.1% of 29840 is 5998. So, prostate cancer kills 5998 of men in the 65-74 age bracket.

For non-hodgkins lymphoma, 22.1 of deaths occur in the 65-74 age bracket. That's 4197 deaths, INCLUDING WOMEN. So prostate cancer kills more men in the 65-74 age bracket than non-hodgkin lymphoma kills men and women in the 65-74 age bracket combined.

If we continue, we see that this trend continues for most cancers at most ages. So, saying that prostate cancer isn't serious because "men dont die from it, they die with it" or "only old men die from prostate cancer" is simply untrue. And even so...the high number of prostate cancer deaths in the 75-84 age bracket is one major reason why men are much like to reach their late 80s and 90s than women are.

Just wanted to share!