Death rates from cancer in the UK have dropped by 10% over the last decade, thanks to progress in diagnosing and treating the disease, but the number of deaths keeps rising because more people are falling ill.
The figures, released by Cancer Research UK, show the four major killers – breast, bowel, lung and prostate cancer – have become less deadly relatively speaking. In 2013, the latest year for which full figures are available, 284 out of every 100,000 people in the UK died from the disease – around 162,000 people. A decade ago the death rate was 312 in every 100,000.
But the growing numbers of people being diagnosed with cancer as the population ages and obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking and drinking take their toll, has climbed, which means the actual number of deaths each year has risen over the last decade. Some cancers continue to pose a major problem: the death rates from liver and pancreatic cancer are rising, not falling.
“It’s important to remember that even though the death rates are falling, the overall number of people dying from cancer is expected to increase,” said Sir Harpal Kumar, chief executive of CRUK. “This is because the population is growing and more of us are living longer. Too many people are still being diagnosed with and dying from cancer, not just here in the UK but around the world.”
There are troubling variations in the outcomes for patients around the country. Cally Palmer, the new national cancer director appointed by NHS England, told the Guardian in her first interview in the job that she wants all patients to have equal outcomes and a good experience at the hands of the NHS, wherever they live. “I want to be able to say we have the best cancer care available anywhere in the world,” she said. “We’ve made huge improvement but there’s still a place to go in eradicating variation and keeping up to speed with changes in cancer treatment.”
She will oversee a big shakeup in the way cancer treatment is organised. Palmer, who has been appointed to implement the national cancer plan published last July, wants to bring GPs, public health experts and hospital staff working on cancer together, so that they look at the cancer issues in their area and address them as a team. All would have access to a dashboard of results, which will show them what is going well and what is going badly.
Cancer survival rates in Britain still lag behind other comparable countries in Europe, in part because all countries are improving. But the regional variations are sometimes shocking. In some areas, people diagnosed with lung cancer are four times more likely to die than in others. That is partly because in some less affluent places, lung cancer caused by smoking is more common and people have more advanced disease when they finally see the GP. But there are also variations in standards of care.
Source: theguardian.com
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