United States: According to an international survey conducted under the auspices of Charles Sturt University, Australia, global cancer incidence and death rates are expected to increase sharply by 2050.
They find widening disparities between low Human Development Index (HDI) countries and very high ones, raising concerns and demanding further actions in cancer prevention and management at the global level.
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According to the study, “Global Disparities of Cancer and Its Projected Burden in 2050,” published in JAMA Network Open, the experts worked with data from thirty-six cancer varieties coming from 186 countries and territories with the help of the Global Cancer Observatory database.
Information was grouped according to age, sex, geographical areas, and the HDI measures, which showcased a country’s general health, education, and income, medicalxpress.com reported.
How conclusions were made?
To measure the corresponding risks, they also looked at figures such as how many people are developing cancer and how many are dying of it in proportion to the entire population, and they oriented these by age distributions between populations.
This measure is called Mortality to Incidence Ratio, which is obtained from the simple division of cancer mortality by newly recorded cancer incidence.
For example, a higher MIR implies that the majority of cancer patients are dead from the disease, hence a poor survival rate.
To make a prediction of what cancer rates could possibly look like by 2050 prevalence of the disease was done using population forecasts of the United Nations.
To project a future number of cancer incidences and mortality, they used the assumption that cancer rates remain constant to the expected larger and older world population in the year 2050, medicalxpress.com reported.
Results of analysis
According to this analysis, global cancer incidence is projected to rise by 76.6 percent from 20 million in 2022 to 35.3 million in 2050.
Total cancer deaths are anticipated to increase by 89.7 percent to 18.5 million in 2050 from 9.7 million in 2022.
This is even more apparent when comparing the rates of different HDI ratings between countries.
By the year 2050, Low HDI countries are predicted to undergo a 142.1 percent incidence rate of cancer and a 146.1 percent mortality rate.
Very high HDI countries, on the other hand, would likely see a rise in cases by forty-one point seven percent and an increase in deaths by fifty-six point eight percent.