Cancer death rates fall more slowly among women

A LEGACY of unhealthy lifestyles among women mean their death rate from cancer is falling slower than men’s, research suggests.

Smoking and drinking, which took off among women in the 1960s and 1970s, are now having an effect on cancer rates.

While men started to give up smoking a few decades later, women were slower to do so, experts say.

The research, published in the Annals of Oncology, suggests male death rates from cancer have dropped 8.2 per cent across Europe over the past five years, but for women they dropped just 3.6 per cent.

Mortality rates for cancers are predicted to decline, except among pancreatic cancer patients in both sexes and lung cancer in women.

The researchers, from the University of Milan, predict lung cancer will cause 275,700 deaths across Europe this year – about 20 per cent of all cancer deaths.

Lead researcher Professor Carlo La Vecchia said: ‘Fewer women than men will die from cancer, but the fact that the rate of decline is slower in women than in men reflects the different trends in lung and other tobaccorelated cancers between the two sexes.’

Experts estimate that since 1988, improvements in prevention, detection and treatment of cancers has led to more than four million deaths being avoided.

Separate research, reported in the Mail earlier this month, predicted the incidence of cancer diagnoses in Britain would rise six times faster for women than for men over the next 20 years. Better medical treatments mean death rates are dropping, but the number of cases are still expected to rise by 3.2 per cent for women until 2035, compared to just 0.5 per cent for men.

That analysis, by Cancer Research UK, also pinned the blame on lifestyle, with obesity, smoking and drinking among women set to increase the number of cases of breast, ovarian, liver and lung cancer.