Breast cancer to cause a million deaths a year by 2040, says Lancet commission
Around 7.8 million women diagnosed with breast cancer in the last five years, with 685,000 deaths in 2020; LMICs disproportionately affected
NEW DELHI: Breast cancer is now the world’s most common carcinogenic disease with the ailment likely to cause a million deaths a year by 2040, according to a new Lancet Commission on breast cancer. Around 7.8 million women were diagnosed with breast cancer in the last five years until 2020 and about 685,000 women died from the disease the same year, it said.
Further, in 2020, women around the world on average had a 1 in 12 risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer before turning 75 years old, and this incidence is rising, researchers found. They estimated that cases of breast cancer cases will increase from 2.3 million in 2020 to more than 3 million by 2040, with lowand middle-income countries (LMICs) being “disproportionately affected”.
By 2040, deaths due to the disease will be a million a year, the team added. “This is neither acceptable nor inevitable as action now can prevent many of these future cancers,” the authors wrote. Knowledge gaps, such as unknown numbers of women with metastatic breast cancer in which the cancer spreads to other parts, continue to prevent effective action, they said.
The scale of suffering associated with breast cancer, along with other costs, are not wellmeasured, with the society and policymakers only seeing the “tip of an iceberg,” the authors of the commission said. “Recent improvements in breast cancer survival represent a great success of modern medicine,” said the commission’s lead author, Charlotte Coles, University of Cambridge, UK, referring to 40 per cent reduced deaths due to the disease achieved in some high-income countries (HICs).
“However, we can’t ignore how many patients are being systematically left behind,” said Coles. It points to “glaring inequities” and suffering from symptoms, despair and financial burden due to breast cancer, which are often “hidden and inadequately addressed”.
Laying out recommendations for tackling these challenges in breast cancer, the commission suggested better
communication between patients and health professionals as a crucial intervention that could improve quality of life, body image, and adherence to therapy, and positively impact survival.