In addition to the study’s wide and sweeping conclusions, researchers discovered a number of disparities along gender and geographic boundaries.
Over half of all cancer deaths that are linked to the three biggest risks, including smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and having a high body mass index, are preventable.
According to a study, which was published in the journal The Lancet, avoidable risk factors may be responsible for 44.4% of all cancer deaths and 42% of healthy years lost in 2019.
“To our knowledge, this study represents the largest effort to date to determine the global burden of cancer attributable to risk factors, and it contributes to a growing body of evidence aimed at estimating the risk-attributable burden for specific cancers nationally, internationally, and globally,” Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and his colleagues wrote in the study.
Tracheal, bronchus, and lung cancer were the leading cancers in terms of risk-attributable fatalities worldwide in 2019, according to the study.
The statistics also revealed that risk-attributable cancer mortality are on the rise, increasing by 20.4% globally between 2010 and 2019. In terms of risk-attributable death rates in 2019, the top five regions were central Europe, east Asia, North America, southern Latin America, and western Europe.
“These findings highlight that a substantial proportion of cancer burden globally has potential for prevention through interventions aimed at reducing exposure to known cancer risk factors but also that a large proportion of cancer burden might not be avoidable through control of the risk factors currently estimated,” the researchers wrote.
“Thus, cancer risk reduction efforts must be coupled with comprehensive cancer control strategies that include efforts to support early diagnosis and effective treatment.”
Researchers calculated the cancer burden associated with each risk factor by examining the relationships between 23 cancers and 34 different risk variables, which they classified as environmental and occupational, behavioural, or metabolic.
They were able to discover which activities were connected with the largest number of cancer fatalities by breaking down the data by year, age group, gender, cause, and region.
In addition to the study’s wide and sweeping conclusions, researchers discovered a number of disparities along gender and geographic boundaries.
According to the report, the rate of cancer deaths caused by these modifiable risk factors was actually higher in men than in women in 2019. 2.88 million cancer deaths in men were linked to preventable hazards, accounting for around 50.6% of all male cancer deaths. It was 1.58 million, or 36.3%, for women.
The national cancer screening programme Screen for Life has recently issued a new call for the public to get screened for breast and bowel cancer.
Under Qatar’s National Cancer Programme, the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) is expanding access to breast and bowel screening nationwide in an effort to detect the early stages of the disease before it spreads and becomes more difficult to treat.
