Despite medical progress, cancer continues to wreak havoc. According to the 2024 panorama of the National Cancer Institute published this Thursday, 433,000 new cases were detected last year in France, where the incidence of cancer has been rising sharply for about twenty years. This is of course explained by the increase and aging of the population but also by the risks linked to lifestyles.
Responsible for more than 162,400 deaths each year, cancers remain the leading cause of death in men and the second leading cause of death in women after cardiovascular diseases. According to the Inca, the latter are increasingly affected by lung and pancreatic cancers with a worrying increase in the incidence rate in women of 4.3% and 2.1% per year. With the major factor in this development being tobacco consumption which “began in the 1970s-1980s in women”, later than in men.
Mortality continues to decline
Among the most common cancers, for men, we find prostate cancer (59,885 cases), lung cancer (33,438 cases) and colon-rectal cancer (26,212 cases). And for women, breast cancer (61,214 cases), colorectal cancer (21,370 cases) and lung cancer (19,339 cases).
In this rather unhappy panorama, the institute nevertheless notes that mortality linked to cancers has generally decreased over the years thanks to earlier detections and advances in treatments. This decrease appears more marked in men than in women, due to “earlier diagnoses and significant therapeutic advances among the more frequent cancers” in the former.