Cancer rates jump by 20 per cent among the UK’s middle aged – but why?

We launched our new advertising campaign today. The campaign aims to raise awareness about cancer and the work we do to prevent and treat the disease, and to help raise funds to keep our crucial support flowing to the UK’s best cancer researchers.
You can watch the ad, and hear the stories of the people involved, on our website.
As part of our work behind the scenes for this campaign, we looked in-depth at the latest cancer statistics. One thing we noticed from the mass of data was that cancer rates in middle-aged men and women in Britain have gone up by nearly 20 per cent in a single generation.
To put it another way, more men and women between the ages of 40 and 59 years are hearing the words ‘you have cancer’ than ever before.

Figures are for all cancers among people in Great
Britain aged 40-59 years old (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer)

That’s not to say that cancer rates haven’t also increased in other age groups – they have.
But while most people are aware that cancer is common in old age, and that it also affects younger people (particularly because of media coverage of celebrities such as Jade Goody and Kylie Minogue), not much attention has been focused on the middle aged.
For this reason, we’ve dedicated this article to lifting the lid on our stats story – in particular, which cancers are driving this jump in incidence rates among the middle-aged?

Cancer in middle-aged men

Just because cancer incidence rates in middle-aged people have gone up by nearly 20 per cent in a generation, it doesn’t mean that all cancers are on the rise. Rates of some cancers have increased, while others have fallen. So how has the picture changed?
In 1979, the top three cancers in middle-aged men were lung, bowel and bladder cancers. Whilst bowel cancer has remained the second most common cancer, lung cancer has dropped to third, and prostate cancer has now risen from ninth place to become the most common cancer in middle-aged men.

Most commonly diagnosed cancers in men aged 40-59 in 1979 vs 2008 in Great Britain. Incidence rates are age-standardised to the European population. Bowel includes anal cancer.

It may therefore be no surprise that prostate cancer has been the fastest rising cancer in middle-aged men – rates have increased by over 550 per cent since 1979, rising from 7.7 per 100,000 40-59 year old males to 51.0 per 100,000 in 2008. But why?
On their own, the bare statistics don’t explain the reasons for this increase. To understand the trend, you need to know a little bit about how prostate cancer is diagnosed at the moment.
Although there’s no national prostate screening programme in the UK, men can ask their GP to have a PSA test. This is because men with prostate cancer often have higher levels of the PSA protein in their blood.
Unfortunately, men with raised PSA levels don’t always have prostate cancer, while men with lower level sometimes do; and on top of this, PSA tells doctors nothing about whether a tumour will grow quickly enough to cause problems or become life-threatening (Many prostate cancers grow so slowly they wouldn’t cause problems if left untreated).
This means that, since PSA testing was introduced, many more men have been diagnosed with prostate cancer – and are recorded in the official statistics as such – despite not having aggressive disease.
So increasing use of PSA testing is likely to be responsible for a large part of this increase, as men have asked for PSA testing for symptoms of prostate cancer. Just over 3,900 cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in men aged 40-59 in Britain in 2008, compared with around 540 in 1979.
There’s a bigger picture here – a pressing need to discover a better way to test for prostate cancer, in order to diagnose those cancers that are most likely to progress into more advanced, dangerous disease. Thankfully, our scientists are on the case...

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