JAMA: How will cancer affect the United States in 2022?
MELISSA S. How cancer will affect the US in 2022[J]. JAMA, 2022. DOI: 10.1001/jama.2022.2415.
While the gap between cancer diagnosis and continued health services has increased in the American Cancer Society's (ACS) latest annual report on cancer incidence and deaths, hope is looming to address the gap. Advances in treatment, screening, and smoking reduction among primary care physicians in the United States have improved the treatment outlook for lung cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia, and other malignancies.
The data in the 2022 report, recently published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicalians, comes from multiple databases, and cancer incidence rates are based on data collected by the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance Outcomes Program and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. Cancer mortality rates are based on death certificate data from the National Center for Health Statistics. ACS researchers used a subset of data from 2004 to 2019 (representing 98 percent of the U.S. population) to estimate cancer incidence and mortality in 2022. These projections took into account a variety of factors, including cancer screening practices, case reports expected delays and sociodemographic information.
The ACS predicts there will be about 1.9 million new cancer cases and 609,360 cancer deaths this year, which is a slight increase from the 2021 forecast. Professor Rebecca Siegel, MPH, cancer epidemiologist and senior scientific director of ACS surveillance research, noted that these numbers are rising because the U.S. population is growing and aging.
Death rates from lung cancer have declined in recent decades — 56 percent for men from 1990 to 2019, and 32 percent for women from 2002 to 2019. Improvements in early detection and treatment in recent years have helped improve 3-year lung cancer survival rates, from 21% in 2004 to 31% in 2017. The 5-year survival rate for distantly metastatic lung cancer increased by 6%, the survival rate for non-metastatic lung cancer increased by 33%, and the survival rate for localized lung cancer increased by 60%.
Despite progress in lung cancer, concerns remain about other forms of cancer. For example, cervical cancer has consistently been the second leading cause of cancer death among women between the ages of 20 and 39.
Treatment inequalities between different populations persist. The main study showed that from 2014 to 2018, black men had higher cancer rates than Asian and Pacific Islander men or white men. Although black women have lower cancer rates than white women, black women have a 12 percent higher cancer death rate. Statistics show that although the incidence of breast cancer in black women is 4% lower than that of white women, the death rate for black women is 41% higher.
Over time, the impact of the new crown epidemic will gradually become apparent. But as conveyed in the main report, researchers lag in obtaining population-based surveillance data. So how the COVID-19 pandemic will change the outcome of cancer mortality may not become apparent for a few more years.