Breast cancer death rates across Europe are expected to drop in 2025. How do countries compare?
Death rates due to breast cancer in 2025 are set to decrease for women across most age groups in Europe, according to a new study.
The new projections for this year show that breast cancer mortality will drop in every age group except for women over 80, for whom death rates will only decrease in the United Kingdom and Spain.
Published in the journal Annals of Oncology, the study also says that breast cancer death rates will fall by 4 per cent in the EU compared to 2020 and 6 per cent in the UK.
It’s based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations databases for the EU, its five most populous countries (Germany, France, Poland, Spain, and Italy), and the UK.
The fall in breast cancer mortality is largely due to improvements in screening, diagnosis, and treatment, Carlo La Vecchia, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Milan in Italy and lead author of the study, told Euronews Health.
“What's surprising with breast cancer is the proportion of decline… in all European countries and in all age groups under 80,” La Vecchia said.
The increase for elderly women, however, is because they are screened less often than younger women, he said.
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They also “seem to not have the same benefits from the improvements of treatment compared to younger women,” he said, adding that “we have to work on that, to understand whether this is justified or not”.
The research found that between 1989 and 2025, there were an estimated 6.8 million averted cancer deaths in EU countries, including more than 370,000 breast cancer deaths.
In the UK, meanwhile, there were 1.5 million avoided cancer deaths, including nearly 200,000 breast cancer deaths, researchers found.
Overall cancer mortality predictions
The researchers estimate that overall cancer death rates have declined in EU countries by 3.5 per cent for men and 1.2 per cent for women since 2020. The overall number of deaths, however, have increased due to population growth and ageing, they added.
The death rates in the UK, meanwhile, have fallen even more by 10.1 per cent among men and 6.3 per cent among women.
They predict that there will be 1.28 million cancer deaths in the EU and 173,000 in the UK in 2025.
Looking at more than 10 different types of cancers, the researchers found that death rates will fall in the EU except for pancreatic cancer in men and women and lung and bladder cancer in women.
In the UK, cancer death rates will fall except for bowel cancer and uterus cancer in women.
Researchers say that risk factors such as smoking, diabetes, being overweight, and obesity may contribute to this rise.
Some of this is related to when certain generations, such as women born in the 1950s, began smoking, La Vecchia said.
“The generations born after the 1970s, they smoked less, and stopping smoking has become more frequent in women too,” he said. “Still, there is a lot to do for lung cancer,” he added.
One of the negative signs is an increase in colorectal cancer deaths among young people in the UK and other countries, he said, adding in a statement that this is “mainly due to increased prevalence of overweight and obesity in the young who are not covered by colorectal cancer screening”.
In terms of limiting risk factors, he recommends stopping smoking, limiting alcohol, and controlling overweight and obesity, and called for increased screening and early diagnosis of cancers.
