Close To Half Of Cancer Deaths Worldwide Are Attributable To Preventable Risk Factors

When it comes to nearly half of cancer-related deaths across the globe, researchers say it can be attributable to preventable risk factors, including the three leading risks: smoking, drinking too much alcohol, or having a high body mass index.

Published research released on Thursday in The Lancet journal, discovered that 44.4% of all cancer deaths and 42% of healthy years lot could be attributable to preventable risk factors 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, who is the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, wrote in the study.

The paper, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, probed the relationship between risk factors and cancer, which is the second leading cause of death worldwide, through data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease project, Kvia reported.

The project collects and analyzes data from around the world regarding deaths and disability. Murray and his colleagues focused on cancer deaths and disability between 2010 to 2019 across 204 countries and examined 23 cancer types and 34 risk factors.

The leading cancers when it came to risk-attributable deaths globally in 2019 were tracheal, bronchus, and lung cancer among men and women, the researchers learned.

The data also showed that risk-attributable cancer deaths continue to rise, increasing worldwide by 20.4% from 2010 to 2019. In 2019, the leading five regions in terms of risk-attributable death rates 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.”

The new study also “clearly delineates” the importance of primary cancer prevention and “the increasing cancer numbers related to obesity clearly demands our attention,” Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer for the American Cancer Society, wrote in an email to CNN. She was not a part of the study.

“Modifying behavior could lead to millions more lives saved greatly overshadowing the impact of any drug ever approved,” he wrote, adding, “The continued impact of tobacco despite approximately 65 years of a linkage to cancer remains very problematic.”