Some features of leukaemia mortality.

Abstract

During 1953 there were just over forty deaths per week from leukaemia in England and Wales. This was, of course, a small proportion of the total number of deaths, but the years of potential life lost by death from leukaemia were disproportionately great: greater, for example (reckoning life to the age of 75) than those lost by death from peptic ulcer, non-respiratory tuberculosis, or all diseases conventionally attributed to viruses. Leukaemia derives an added importance from the fact that its rate of increase in recent years has been greater than that of any other cause of death except lung cancer and coronary thrombosis. Yet hardly anything has been written about leukaemia from the epidemiological point of view. There seem to be two reasons for this neglect: the number of cases observed by a single clinician is rarely sufficient to suggest any aetiological hypothesis; and a suspicion exists (also expressed in connexion with lung cancer and coronary thrombosis) that standards of diagnosis may have varied from time to time and from place to place in such a way as to vitiate any statistical analysis. The present study therefore suffers from two faults: that it had to be based entirely on secondary sources, and that it had to be conducted as if diagnostic standards were always uniform. This may not deprive the conclusions of all value; for example, the effect of regional variation in speed of diagnosis is kept to a minimum by restricting attention to death certificates.