By NYSOFA Advocacy Specialist Colleen Scott
It is unlikely that anyone reading this article hasn’t been touched by cancer in some way. Whether you are a cancer survivor, have a friend or relative who has been diagnosed, or someone you love has died from cancer, just about everyone has felt the effects.
Progress in cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment have led to overall declines in cancer death rates. But many groups still bear a disproportionate burden and have not benefited equitably from these advances. People of color, individuals of lower socioeconomic status, and those living in rural areas, for example, continue to experience higher mortality rates.
General statistics
- Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020, or nearly one in six deaths.
- Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide.
- Large differences in cancer incidence and mortality also exist among U.S. population groups. These disparities are largely explained by differences in access to health care, diet, lifestyle, cultural barriers, and disparate exposures to pathogens and carcinogens.
- Comorbidities in cancer patients are chronic diseases that commonly co-occur with cancer because of shared risk factors. Common comorbid diseases include obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular, liver, and autoimmune diseases, chronic infections, but also dysbiosis and neurological and stress-related disorders.
Disparities
- Minority, immigrant, and other underserved populations continue to experience an excessive cancer burden not only due to barriers in access to health care, but also because of disparate exposure to carcinogens, pathogens, co-morbidities, environmentally induced stress, and ancestry-related risk factors.
- African Americans disproportionately bear the cancer burden and have the highest death rates from malignancies of the breast, gastrointestinal tract, lung, and prostate, and develop multiple myeloma more commonly than other population groups.
- Rural communities experience higher death rates from lung, cervical, and colorectal cancers than urban communities because of poverty, health risk behavior, and lower vaccination and screening rates.
- American Indians and African Americans have significantly higher rates of comorbidities when compared to other U.S. population groups.
- Four comorbidities – obesity, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and hypertension – contribute disproportionally to the mortality disparity between African Americans and European Americans.
- Diabetes approximately doubles the risk for liver and pancreas cancer and is additionally associated with the risk of breast, colorectal, endometrial, esophageal, and gallbladder cancer.
- Black women have higher cancer incidence rates than White women for all major types of cancer except for breast cancer, lung cancer, and all cancers combined.
- People of color have higher incidence rates than White people for cancers caused by infections. These include cancers in the cervix, liver, and stomach. The only exception was cervical cancer among Asian Pacific Islanders, which was comparable to rates among White women.
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