A national report shows decades of falling cancer deaths led by improvements in lung cancer survival, though it remains the leading cause of cancer mortality.
RT’s Three Key Takeaways:
- Mortality Reductions: Cancer death rates among both men and women dropped between 2019 and 2023, primarily spurred by rapid progress in reducing lung cancer mortality.
- Persistent Pulmonary Burden: Despite notable advances over the first quarter of the century, lung cancer remains the second most diagnosed cancer and the number one cause of cancer death in the US.
- Clinical Focus: Sustaining downward trends in mortality will require expanding access to early detection, timely diagnosis, state-of-the-art therapies, and continued tobacco control initiatives.
Overall cancer death rates decreased for both men and women from 2019 to 2023, extending a downward trend that has continued for more than two decades, according to findings from the 2026 Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer published in the journal Cancer.
According to the report, the sustained decline in cancer mortality across the US is largely driven by accelerated progress against lung cancer. The findings reflect a collaborative surveillance effort conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR).
Lung Cancer Trends and Challenges
A special topic within this year’s edition examined changes in lung cancer risk factors and associated clinical outcomes across the first 25 years of the 21st century. Even with decades of clinical and public health advances, lung cancer continues to rank as the second most common cancer in both men and women, and it remains the leading cause of cancer death nationwide, the authors reported.
Researchers stated in a news release that maintaining future progress will depend not only on further reducing cigarette smoking and promoting tobacco-free spaces, but also on equitable access to early cancer detection, prompt diagnosis, and advanced treatments across the healthcare system.
Incidence Rates Across Cancer Types
The report evaluated national incidence trends from 2003 through 2022, revealing that overall rates of new cancer cases climbed slightly each year between 2018 and 2022. Investigators attributed that rise to increased diagnoses of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.
Breast and prostate malignancies remain the most diagnosed forms of cancer among women and men, respectively. However, despite an uptick in prostate cancer cases, the broader rate of new cancer diagnoses among men remained stable overall during that timeframe, according to registry findings.
The annual update utilized population-based registry data collected by CDC and NCI, aggregated by NAACCR, along with cancer mortality statistics from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) spanning 2004 to 2023.
