Abstract
AN annotation in the Journal of the American Medical Association of April 181 states that since a cancer control programme was inaugurated fifteen years ago in Massachusetts, about 14,000 patients with cancer, 40 percent of whom are still alive, have attended the special clinics for the disease. 80-8 percent of the patients were referred by medical practitioners to the clinics as compared with only 20-1 percent in the first year of the programme. Between 1927 and 1935, 421 medical men used the tumour diagnostic service as compared with 798 in 1940. As regards the education of the public, the delay between the time of the first recognized symptom of the disease and the time that the patient obtained medical advice averaged 6-5 months in the early years of the programme, whereas between 1936 and 1939 it was 5-3 months and in 1940 4-6 months. In 1932,31 1 percent of the fatal cases had never been treated in a cancer hospital, while in 1940 this figure was reduced to 15-6 percent, indicating that hospitalization for cancer is increasing far more rapidly than cases of the disease.
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Cancer Control. Nature 150, 89–90 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/150089d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/150089d0