2022 American Cancer Society Facts & Figures Released

Risk of Dying from Cancer Continues to Drop at an Accelerated Pace

       
The American Cancer Society has released it's annual cancer statistics report —“Cancer Statistics, 2022” — a a scientific paper published in the American Cancer Society journal, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The information is also available in an educational companion PDF report, Cancer Facts & Figures 2022 and is available on the interactive website, the Cancer Statistics Center.

Here are some of the highlights:

• The cancer death rate for men and women combined fell 32% from its peak in 1991 to 2019. Some of this drop appears to be related to an increase in the percentage of people with lung cancer who are living longer after diagnosis, partly because more people are being diagnosed at an early stage of the disease.

• The risk of dying from prostate cancer is only decreasing by .6% a year. The cause for this slowing progress may be related to changes in screening guidelines in 2012.

• In females, breast cancer incidence rates have been slowly increasing by about .5% a year since the mid-2000s. This rise in diagnoses is due in part to more women having obesity, having fewer children, or having their first baby after age 30.

• Black women have a 41% higher breast cancer death rate than White women even though their incidence of breast cancer is 4% lower.

• Cancer survival rates are lower for Black people than for White people for almost every cancer type.

• American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest liver cancer incidence of any major racial/ethnic group in the U.S. The risk of developing liver cancer among them is more than double that in White people.
   

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