A study released Thursday points to a mixed and rapidly shifting picture in cancer trends. On the one hand, the American Cancer Society's annual survey found that mortality from the disease declined rapidly, by 34%, between 1991 and 2022. But at the same time, for reasons little understood, more young and middle aged women are getting the disease.
New techniques for detecting and treating many cancers has revolutionized survival rates over the past couple of decades. But those gains are threatened by the increasing threat from earlier onset cancers affecting those under age 65, who historically were not at high risk of developing the disease.
The American Cancer Society report projects more than 2 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in 2025 and more than 600,000 people will die.
The survey found women are seeing spikes. Overall, cancer incidence rates among women under age 50 were 82% higher than their male counterparts in 2021, up from 51% in 2002. Women aged 50-64 are also getting cancer at higher rates than men.
Breast cancer in particular has been rising faster among women under 50 — it's up by 1.4% a year since the mid 2000s, compared to a 0.7% annual rise among older women.
"Continued reductions in cancer mortality because of drops in smoking, better treatment and earlier detection is certainly great news," Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society, said in a statement. "However, this progress is tempered by rising incidence in young and middle-aged women, who are often the family caregivers, and a shifting cancer burden from men to women."
For men the picture is mixed. There have been big declines in rates of lung cancer incidence for men of all ages since 1975, but prostate cancer has been rising; it spiked starting in 2014.
The study also points to racial inequities in access to health care and prevention. Black and Native American people dying from certain cancers at rates 2 to 3 times higher than their white counterparts. Cervical cancer, which is considered treatable if monitored through pap smears, kills people in those communities at much higher rates.
While treatments and immunotherapies have helped survival rates for many forms of cancer, the same progress is not seen across all forms of the disease. Mortality rates are increasing among cancers of the oral cavity, pancreas, uterine corpus, and liver, for example.
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