The risk of death from cancer may depend on where you live

Reuters Health - Cancer death rates are surging in some regions of the U.S. even as fatalities steadily decline nationwide, a new study suggests.

Overall, the U.S. death rate from cancer has dropped about 20 percent from 1980 to 2014, the study found. Cancer fatalities now account for about 192 deaths for every 100,000 people in the U.S., down from 240 per 100,000 at the start of the study period.

But in some parts of the country where poverty, obesity and smoking are more common, rates of death from cancer are going up.

“Known cancer risk factors – smoking, diet, and obesity, among others – combined with poor prevention programs may increase cancer cases,” said senior study author Dr. Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“Unequal access to and quality of care are likely contributors to cancer mortality disparities, and the lack of early detection for some cancers and lack of specialized treatment can be deadly,” Murray added by email.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States and globally, after heart disease. Most previous reports on geographic differences in cancer mortality in the U.S. have focused on variation by state, the researchers note in JAMA.

For the current study, researchers estimated mortality rates at the county level for 29 types of cancer using death records from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and population counts from the Census Bureau, the NCHS and the Human Mortality Database.

Nationwide, there were about 19.5 million cancer deaths during the study period.

This included 7 million deaths from lung, tracheal and bronchus cancer; 6 million breast cancer fatalities; 5 million deaths from colon and rectal tumors; 2 million from pancreatic malignancies and 1 million from prostate cancer.

For many types of cancer, there were clusters of counties with especially high death rates.