New cases of cancer will rise by half by 2030, reaching 21.6m per year compared to 14m in 2012, the UN said on Monday in a global analysis of the scourge.
Cancer deaths, meanwhile, will likely rise from 8.2m to 13m per year as the world’s population grows and ages and more people adopt risky lifestyle habits, said the report compiled by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).
It took aim at Big Tobacco, saying its sales drive was “inextricably linked” to a likely surge in lung cancer.
Released on World Cancer Day, the report was compiled by more than 250 scientists from over 40 countries. It is the first such overview in six years.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) Director General Margaret Chan, whose agency oversees the IARC, said the overall impact from cancer would “unquestionably” hit developing countries the hardest.
These nations are already grappling with poverty-associated cancers caused by infection or disease, she said.
Added to that would be cancers blamed on more affluent lifestyles – high tobacco and alcohol use, eating processed foods and not exercising enough.
The IARC director Christopher Wild said the focus should be on prevention.
“The particularly heavy burden projected to fall on low- and middle-income countries makes it implausible to treat our way out of cancer, even the highest-income countries will struggle to cope with the spiralling costs of treatment and care,” he said.
Cancer overtook heart disease as the number one cause of death in the world in 2011.
New cases will likely increase to 19.3m in 2025, with 11.4m deaths, said Wild. By 2035, new cases would number about 24m per year.
The report found a slight gender bias: 53 per cent of cancer cases and 57 per cent of deaths were among men.
In men, cancer most often attacked the lungs (16.7 per cent) followed by the prostate (15 per cent), colorectum (10 per cent), stomach (8.5 per cent), and liver (7.5 per cent).
For women, cancer was most common in the breast (25.2 per cent), colorectum (9.2 per cent), lung (8.7 per cent), cervix (7.9 per cent) and stomach (4.8 per cent).
There were also regional imbalances: more than 60 per cent of the world’s cancer cases and 70 per cent of deaths occurred in Africa, Asia and Central and South America, said the World Cancer Report.
Measured as a proportion of the population, however, high-income countries in North America and Western Europe as well as Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, had higher figures.
Cancers of the breast, colorectum and prostate were more typical of the industrialised world, said the report, and those of the liver, stomach and oesophagus more common in low-income countries.
Almost half the new cases diagnosed in 2012 were in Asia, most of them in China, said the report. Europe had nearly a quarter of cases, the Americas about a fifth, and Africa and the Middle East just over eight per cent.
But when it came to deaths, Asia’s share jumped to more than 50 per cent and that of Africa and the Middle East to nearly 10 per cent, while the Americas’ share shrank to under 16 per cent and Europe to 21.4 per cent.
Cancer is typically diagnosed at a more advanced stage in less developed countries, said the report.
