US cancer death rate sees largest single-year drop in history

The rate of people dying from cancer in the United States has seen its largest single-year drop, spurred by a sharp drop in lung cancer deaths as fewer Americans smoke cigarettes and as better treatments have become available. 

That’s according to a new report from the American Cancer Society, which found that, between 2016 and 2017, there was a 2.2 per cent plunge in cancer deaths. It marks the 26th year in a row that cancer deaths have dropped.

“What is really driving that is the acceleration in the decline of mortality for lung cancer, and the reason that is encouraging is because lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death, causing more deaths in the US than breast, colorectal cancer and prostate cancers combined,” Rebecca Siegel, an author of the report, told CNN.

“That’s really important and reflects improvements in the treatment of lung cancer across the continuum from improvements in staging to advances in surgical techniques, improvements in radiotherapy, all of these things coming together. We were very encouraged to see that not only is the decline continuing for cancer mortality but we saw the biggest single-year drop ever from 2016 to 2017.”

An analysis of the report shows that, since it reached its peak in 1991 of around 215 cancer deaths per 100,000 people, cancer death rates have dropped in every year since. In 2017, the rate was 29 per cent down from that, with an estimated 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths that year.

Ms Siegel says the decline in smoking rates is the biggest cause of the drop, following a massive effort by health officials in the country over the past decades to stem the rate of smoking.

In 2018, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced that smoking rates had fallen to a record low in the US, with around 14 per cent of adults — or 34.3 million — who smoked cigarettes the year before.

That’s compared to 1965, when a whopping 42.4 per cent of adults in the US smoked cigarettes.

Officials cite a variety of reasons for that drop, including initiatives to raise the price of tobacco, education programmes to educate people about the risk of smoking and programmes aimed at helping people quit.

The new American Cancer Society report notes that it’s not just lung cancer that has seen declining death rates, and that the declining death rate for breast, prostate and colorectal cancer also reflect the progress that has been made to combat the diseases.

The rate of death for breast cancer, for instance, has fallen by 40 per cent since its peak in 1989. Prostate cancer rates have fallen by 53 per cent since 1993. Colorectal cancer rates have fallen among men by 53 per cent since 1980, and among women by 57 per cent since 1969.

The report data would suggest further declines in cancer rates can be expected in 2020.