Cancer cases worldwide are expected to soar in the coming decades, a report finds. Here’s why.
The World Health Organization tempered optimism about improvements in cancer treatment and said global health care inequities are driving more cases and deaths.
Annual cancer cases are projected to rise considerably worldwide by 2050, according to a World Health Organization report on cancer published Wednesday. With its assessment, the United Nations body tempered optimism about improvements in cancer surveillance and treatment and warned that global health care inequities are driving further cases and deaths.
Around 20.6 million people were diagnosed with cancer in 2024, according to the findings. That number could reach 35 million a year by 2050.
The new cancer cases will disproportionately be borne by lower-income countries with poorer access to cancer surveillance and treatment, according to the report.
“Far too many people are still being left behind,” André Ilbawi, the lead for cancer control at WHO, said at a news conference about the study this week.
Cancer cases have risen globally in recent years, and other recent reports have given similar projections for 2050 as the WHO’s latest study. One in five people will develop cancer in their lifetime, according to the WHO.
The reasons behind the increasing cancer rates are complex. Some cancers have become more common in different age groups. But the volume of cancer diagnoses is also being driven by improved detection and the fact that people are living longer, which increases the likelihood of developing age-associated cancers.
In the United States, the rate of new cancer cases has generally been stable in recent years, according to the National Institutes of Health, and the cancer death rate has declined.
Emil Lou, an oncologist and associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, said in an interview that improvements to treatments such as immunotherapy have greatly increased patient survivability for some advanced cancers like lung cancer.
“While we’ve made great progress as a society in treating some forms of cancer more effectively than ever before, the rise in cancer prevalence worldwide reminds us that we still have a very long way to go,” said Lou, who was not involved in the WHO study.
The WHO’s report highlighted the steep differences in cancer outcomes for regions without access to better cancer treatment and surveillance. Researchers cited statistics for breast and cervical cancer to illustrate the disparity.
“In higher-income countries in Europe, in North America, we see cervical cancer has been decreasing … to almost elimination,” said Isabelle Soerjomataram, an epidemiologist with the International Agency for Research on Cancer who spoke at the WHO news conference. “In many countries of sub-Saharan Africa, it is still the top, number one cancer.”
In high-income countries, the five-year net survival rate for breast cancer now exceeds 85 percent, according to the WHO; in low-income countries, it drops below 30 percent.
Countries both rich and poor are not adequately investing in programs for cancer prevention and treatment, the report said, though it highlighted moderate progress in curbing some practices and conditions that can cause cancer.
The report praised global progress in adopting measures to reduce tobacco use, which has dropped 27 percent since 2010. Separately, 85 percent of countries now have human papillomavirus vaccines in their national vaccine programs, according to the report, and an estimated 31 percent of girls have received the first dose of the vaccine, up from 17 percent in 2019.
Among the most alarming trends researchers highlighted in the report was a failure by most countries to curb rising obesity rates. Obesity has been linked to over a dozen cancers, including liver, pancreatic and colorectal cancer, according to the NIH.
“It will be a significant added burden for every country globally when cancers associated with obesity become the norm,” Ilbawi said. “That will likely happen in a significant number of countries in the next 20 or 30 years.”
Soerjomataram said that while the report’s projections for future cancer cases may be alarming, many of them are preventable.
“Four in 10 new cancer cases are linked to risk factors ... we already know how to address,” Soerjomataram said.
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