Mortality
The number of deaths from a disease in a population per year. Cancer mortality has fallen about a third since 1991 in the US, mostly from less smoking, earlier detection and better treatment.
Mortality rates are the hardest and most important measure of progress because they are immune to the biases that inflate incidence and survival statistics: finding more harmless cancers raises incidence and apparent survival but does not reduce deaths. A screening test is only proven if it lowers disease-specific mortality in a randomised trial, as mammography, colonoscopy and low-dose CT for smokers have and PSA screening only marginally has; 'stage shift' is a surrogate for this. Cancer is now the leading cause of death in many high-income countries as heart disease declines, and global cancer deaths are rising with ageing populations even as age-adjusted rates fall.