Prostate cancer death rate set to reduce by 10 per cent

Daily Telegraph Reporter PROSTATE cancer death rates are expected to fall in the UK and across nearly all European Union countries this year thanks to better diagnosis and treatment, analysis suggests.

The mortality rate in the EU is predicted this year to have fallen by 7.1 per cent since 2015, with 78,800 men expected to die from the disease in 2020.

The age-adjusted death rate is 9.95 per 100,000 men for this year, compared with 10.71 per 100,000 in 2015.

In the UK, the researchers forecast that there would be 11.99 prostate cancer deaths per 100,000 men in 2020, compared with 13.25 per 100,000 in 2015.

The calculations are based on figures from the World Health Organisation and Eurostat databases for 1970-2015 and have been age standardised – a technique epidemiologists use to allow populations to be compared.

Poland is the only country where the prostate cancer death rate is rising, with a predicted death toll of 6,100 men by the end of 2020.

Prof Carlo La Vecchia, of the University of Milan’s School of Medicine in Italy, who led the study, said: “Across the EU as a whole, the key message from these prostate cancer death rates is to adopt up-to-date surgery and radiotherapy techniques, together with newer androgen deprivation therapy.

“This may have a relevant impact on prostate cancer mortality even in the absence of cure, since a proportion of elderly men may survive long enough to die from other causes.”

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. In the UK, around one in eight men will get the disease.

While prostate cancer death rates – the ratio of deaths to the population – are falling, the number of men dying from the disease is predicted to increase as the ageing population grows.

In 2015, 74,998 men died from the disease in the EU compared with the 78,800 forecast to die in 2020.

In the UK, 11,827 men died in 2015 compared with 12,000 predicted to die from prostate cancer this year, a drop of 9.5 per cent when adjusted for age.

Dr Matthew Hobbs, deputy director of research at Prostate Cancer UK, said: “We know that research carried out over the past 20 years has led to improvements in diagnosis and treatment. It is great to see that research has reduced the death rate.

“However, with incidence of prostate cancer rising in the UK, and the number of men reaching an age that increases their risk, combined with faster progress in other diseases, we need much bigger and quicker reductions in the death rate to stop the number of prostate deaths continuing to rise every year.”

Meanwhile, figures show death rates are rising in women in the EU by 6 per cent for lung cancer and 1.2 per cent for pancreatic cancers between 2015 and 2020.

The findings journal Annals of Oncology.