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 While the prediction seems alarming, the researchers say the
increase is partly due to people living longer overall.
“Everyone has to die of something and the longer people live the
more likely that they will have previously been treated for a
serious illness,” wrote Peter Sasieni, the study’s senior researcher
from Queen Mary University of London, in an email to Reuters Health.
As reported in the British Journal of Cancer, he and his coauthors
estimated the lifetime risk of cancer, excluding non-melanoma skin
cancer, in Britain for men and women born from 1930 to 1960.
They used data on all causes of death in the UK from 1951 through
2012 and projected causes of death from 2013 to 2060, as well as
data on the number of cancer diagnoses and cancer deaths from 1971
to 2009.
For men, lifetime cancer risk rose from about 39 percent for those
born in 1930 to about 54 percent for those born in 1960. Risk
increased similarly for women, from about 37 percent to about 48
percent.
“I was surprised when I first calculated that the risk was just over
50 percent for people born in 1960,” Sasieni said.
Along with modifiable risk factors for cancer, such as obesity, he
said people are more likely to develop cancer the longer they live.
“As we become better at avoiding dying from infections, heart
disease, stroke and even road accidents so we are more likely to
live long enough to get cancer,” Sasieni said.
These are actually positive results, agreed Dr. Freddie Bray of the
Cancer Surveillance Section at the International Agency for Research
on Cancer in Lyon, France.
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“Rather little of the risk is due to an increasing cancer risk in
the population,” Bray, who was not involved with the new study, told
Reuters Health by email.
Also, more than half the lifetime risk for people born in 1960 comes
from cancer diagnosed after age 70. In their model, almost 90
percent of men born in 1960 would be diagnosed with cancer by age
120, hypothetically, if they did not die of other causes first.
Additionally, screening tests for breast and prostate cancer catch
many more cases of the disease than would have been diagnosed
previously, Sasieni said.
He suspects the trends would be similar in North America, Western
Europe and Australia.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1FTgqxc
British Journal of Cancer, online February 3, 2015.
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