Cancer killed around 20,300 people in 2019. Relative five-year survival is 61 percent, but more and more people are living with cancer, Statistics Austria reported on Thursday. At the beginning of 2020, there were 375,749 people, four percent of the population.
“A fifth of those affected (20.4 percent) were diagnosed in the previous three years, and almost half of those affected (46.7 percent) have been living with cancer for more than ten years,” explained Statistics Austria Director General Tobias Thomas in a broadcast ahead of World Cancer Day on February 4th. In the past ten years, the number of new cases each year has increased from around 39,000 to around 42,000. Accordingly, the cancer prevalence (the number of people living with cancer on a specific date) has been rising continuously for years.
In 2009, 290,240 people with a cancer diagnosis were living in Austria, which was around 85,500 fewer than in 2019. The increase is mainly due to the fact that there are more and more people of advanced age and the probability of developing cancer increases with age. Increased screening and improved diagnostic methods are also helping to detect cancer more frequently and at an earlier stage. In addition, the chances of survival in the case of cancer are improving, which also increases the number of people living with cancer.
Breast cancer as the leading cause of death
In 2019, 19,161 women and 22,614 men were diagnosed with cancer in Austria. The most common diagnoses were malignant tumors of the breast in women with 5,682 cases and malignant tumors of the prostate in men with 6,039 cases, followed by malignant tumors of the lungs (4,831 cases, both sexes together) and malignant tumors of the colon or rectum (4,444 cases). .
In 2019, breast cancer accounted for around 30 percent of new cases in women and 18 percent of all cancer deaths. Breast cancer was also the leading cause of cancer-related death in women. Prostate cancer accounted for just over a quarter (27 percent) of all new malignancies diagnosed in men in 2019 and was responsible for approximately one in eight cancer deaths (12 percent) in men in 2019.
With about one in five cancer deaths, lung cancer ranked first among the causes of cancer-related deaths in men (21 percent) and in women it was second only to breast cancer (17 percent). Both the risk of developing and dying from lung cancer have increased significantly in women in recent years. Colon cancer was responsible for about ten percent of cancer deaths.
“The data from Statistics Austria’s Austrian National Cancer Register are an essential part of the future annual Austrian Cancer Report, which will be published for the first time in the run-up to World Cancer Day,” said Statistics Austria Director General Thomas. The first Austrian Cancer Report was initiated by the Society for Hematology & Medical Oncology (OeGHO) and the Cancer Aid and will be presented next Tuesday.
Source: Nachrichten
