Why are Cancer Rates

increasing?
Cancer has a major impact on society in the United States and across the world.
Cancer statistics describe what happens in large groups of people and provide a
picture in time of the burden of cancer on society. Statistics tell us things such as
how many people are diagnosed with and die from cancer each year, the number of
people who are currently living after a cancer diagnosis, the average age at
diagnosis, and the numbers of people who are still alive at a given time after
diagnosis.
They also tell us about differences among groups defined by age, sex, racial/ethnic
group, geographic location, and other categories.
By far the biggest risk factor for most cancers is simply getting older. More than
three-quarters of all people diagnosed with cancer in the UK are over the age of 60.
And this is because cancer is a disease of our genes – the bits of DNA code that hold
the instructions for all of the microscopic machinery inside our cells. Over time,
mistakes accumulate in this code – scientists can now see them stamped in cancer’s
DNA. And it’s these mistakes that can kick start a cell’s journey towards becoming
cancerous.
The longer we live, the more time we have for errors to build up. And so, as time
passes, our risk of developing cancer goes up, as we accumulate more of these faults
in our genes.
In the graph below, you can see how UK life expectancy has increased over time
and the number of people living into old age is higher than ever before.
This means there are now more people than ever living to an age where they have a
higher risk of developing cancer.
Interpretation

 Rates of certain other cancers have fallen too – notably those linked to certain infections.
For example, stomach cancer is much less common than it used to be, most likely because
of changes in the way food is prepared, and falling rates of infection with H. pylori (a
bacterium that increases risk).
 And the NHS screening programme has almost certainly prevented an epidemic of
cervical cancer – rates of which are expected to fall further as the effects of the vaccine
against human papillomavirus (HPV) – the virus that causes it – kick in.