Cancer death rates continue to fall

Today our stats team has published new data, forecasting that the proportion of people who die from cancer will continue to fall over the next 18 years.

Rather than penning another 1,000 word treatise on the matter, we thought we’d try something a bit different: presenting the results as an animated video:

(Here’s a transcript for anyone who can’t watch the video – there are some graphs further down the page too).

Our stats team first looked at different cancer types. As you can see, the stats show particularly noteworthy drops in the proportion of people dying from ovarian, bowel, breast and prostate cancers:

We think the main reasons for these projected falls are:

• Improvements in cancer diagnosis and care, as the fruits of decades of research continue to be taken up by the NHS.
• The introduction of the bowel screening programme.
• Recent changes in smoking habits.

All of this adds up to an overall drop from 170 out of every 100,000 people, to 142 per 100,000. That’s a 17 per cent drop.

These figures have been adjusted to take account of the UK’s ageing population (which, paradoxically, will actually lead to an overall increase in the absolute number of cases).

The new stats are good news, and show that the progress over past decades is set to continue in the future. And this is all thanks to research – research on how cancer develops, research on treatments, research on screening and diagnosis and research on understanding tobacco. And our research is only possible thanks to the support of the public.

So we’d like to say a big thanks to all our supporters, for helping improve things for so many people.

Henry

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