UK cancer death rates to fall by 15% by 2035 due to advances in research

Death rates from cancer in the UK will fall by 15% by 2035 thanks to advances in research, diagnosis and treatment, with more Britons living longer after their diagnosis, the charity Cancer Research UK predicts.

Breakthroughs will prevent more than 403,000 deaths from the disease by 2035 that would have happened otherwise, according to an analysis from the charity.

However, although the risk of death from cancer is likely to fall, the number of people dying from it will continue to rise, because the ageing and growing population will result in more people being diagnosed, the charity said. Those factors, and the rise in cancers linked to bad diet and alcohol, mean that a typical Briton’s chances of getting cancer have recently risen from one in three to one in two.

Overall 331 people per 100,000 of population died from any form of cancer in July 2014. But improvements in doctors’ ability to detect, diagnose and treat cancer will see that fall to 280 people per 100,000 of population by 2035, CRUK estimates.

“Thanks to research fewer people will die from cancer in the future. We’re resolute that, by 2035, three in four people will survive their cancer for at least 10 years”, said Sir Harpal Kumar, CRUK’s chief executive. “This will mean making more progress in breast, bowel and blood cancers, but also accelerating our effort in those cancers which are currently hard to treat.”

Even though more people will die from cancer, the diminishing risk of death shows that cancer research and treatment are still yielding benefits and heading in the right direction, the charity said. For example, CRUK believes mortality rates from bowel cancer will fall by 23% over the next 20 years – from 32 to 25 deaths per 100,000 population – thanks to advances in surgery and chemotherapy and also better screening for the disease.

Death rates from breast cancer, the most common form of the disease among women, are projected to drop by 26% to 31 per 100,000 women by 2035. Likewise, mortality rates from lung cancer will be 21% lower by then – at 58 deaths per 100,000 people – according to CRUK’s analysis.

But deaths from pancreatic cancer are estimated to fall by only 3%, to 17 deaths per 100,000; and from brain and related tumours by just 2%, to ten deaths per 100,000 people, CRUK said.

However, the risk of death will increase for some cancers. For example, the mortality rate for liver cancer is expected to rise by 58% by 2035.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, which has made improving cancer outcomes one of its key priorities, said: “These figures underline how the NHS is successfully translating new research and targeted investment into dramatic gains in cancer care. Thanks to improvements over just the past year, an extra 2,400 families will be able to share this Christmas with a loved one who would not have survived cancer a year ago.”

CRUK’s statistical information team arrived at their conclusions by applying the difference in the actual cancer mortality rates in 2014 and the projected age-standardised death rates for all cancers combined in the UK between 2015 and 2035 to the Office for National Statistics’ projections for the UK population over the study period.

Kumar said that while survival rates for some forms of cancer had improved in recent decades, thanks to the development of new drugs and surgical techniques, the variation in death rates for different forms of cancer was still too wide. For example, mortality rates for brain cancer are likely to remain unchanged over the next 20 years, with just one in five patients surviving for five years. Similarly, just three in 100 people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for five years or more after diagnosis.

UK cancer death rates to fall by 15% by 2035 due to advances in research