Mesothelioma Death and Mortality Rate

Death rates, also known as mortality rates, provide valuable information about a cancer’s effect on specific geographical locations and groups of people. Death rate can be explained in several ways, but is most commonly expressed as the number of deaths per million people for a specific population. Mesothelioma death rates are often age-adjusted, which compensates for varying age distributions across the populations being compared.

Death rate and mortality rate may sound different, but they actually refer to the same thing: The number of deaths in general, or from a precise cause, in a specific group of people.

From 1999 to 2010, for example, the age-adjusted death rate for Americans 25 and older was 12.8 deaths per million people. For comparison, the country with the highest age-adjusted death rate from 1994 to 2008 was the United Kingdom with 17.8 deaths per million.

Mesothelioma Death Rate by Gender, United States, 1999-2010

For a variety of reasons, disease specialists did not track the death rates from asbestos cancers over a long period of time. It wasn't until 1999 that the U.S. government began classifying the diseases as a cause of death. This was mostly because doctors rarely discovered them until a post-mortem examination. This was also because pleural mesothelioma is so rare it often was mistaken for lung cancer or another respiratory disease.

Now that asbestos cancers are more well-known and diagnosed more accurately, their mortality rates are coming more into focus. However, the numbers are not positive, and some evidence suggests the death rates are decreasing over time.

CDC Database

The most up-to-date information on asbestos-related death rates comes from CDC WONDER, an online database offered by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The database specifies the number of people who died from the disease over an 11-year period from 1999 to 2010.

Age-adjusted Death Rates

Because the latency period between the first exposure to asbestos and the diagnosis of a related cancer is usually between 25 and 50 years, the death rates that follow include only people aged 25 years and older. Death rates are age-adjusted according to the 2000 U.S. standard population.

Death Rates

From 1999 to 2010, the age-adjusted mesothelioma death rate in the United States was 12.8 deaths per million people.

In 1999, the adjusted rate was 13.2 deaths per million. The death rate dropped to 12.3 deaths per million by the end of 2010, a decline of nearly 7 percent.

During the 11-year period, 27 states surpassed the national average. The five states with the highest rates of asbestos cancer deaths are:

State Mesothelioma Death Rate (1999-2010)

Maine - 22.5 deaths per million
Alaska - 21.1 deaths per million
Washington - 20.3 deaths per million
Wyoming - 18.6 deaths per million
New Jersey - 17.8 deaths per million

Mortality

From 1999 to 2010, 29,639 people in the United States died of mesothelioma. The number of deaths rose from 2,342 in 1999 to 2,573 in 2010, an increase of 231 deaths.

In the majority of cases, death records do not indicate the exact type or subtype of cancer. From 1999 to 2010, there were 2,175 deaths attributed to pleural mesothelioma, 1,071 attributed to peritoneal mesothelioma and 31 attributed to pericardial mesothelioma. There were 3,724 deaths from mesothelioma of other sites.

In all, that is 9,001 deaths by all types. By contrast, 22,638 cases had an unspecified site of origin.

Although the United States no longer mines asbestos, a wide variety of industries and occupations used the toxic mineral throughout the 20th century. Asbestos use in the United States peaked at 803,000 metric tons in 1973 and then declined to approximately 1,700 metric tons in 2007.

The prevalence of asbestos use during the 20th century now poses serious risks, including death, for 1.3 million U.S. construction and general industry workers. The five most at-risk industries are ship and boat building and repairing, industrial and miscellaneous chemicals, petroleum refining, electric light and power and construction. Occupations such as plumbers, pipefitters and boiler makers, mechanical engineers, electricians and elementary school teachers are also at high risk.

Research shows that the incidence of asbestos cancer in the United States likely peaked in 2010. People exposed to asbestos in the 1970s, when the U.S. government first began restricting asbestos use, continue to develop mesothelioma because of the disease's decades-long latency period.

Is There a Mesothelioma Cure?

No cure for mesothelioma has been discovered, but advancements in treatment are helping people to live longer with this cancer.

Current therapies and clinical trials are helping many people with early stage mesothelioma live at least three, five or more years. Some late-stage mesothelioma patients who participate in clinical trials are living around three years with innovative therapies like immunotherapy.People in otherwise good health with up to stage III mesothelioma may qualify for multimodal therapy that pairs aggressive surgery with chemotherapy and radiation therapy. This combined approach attacks the cancer multiple ways to improve treatment results. Many people who receive multimodal therapy for mesothelioma live longer than the average one-year survival rate.

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