“That is 15 percent more than in 2022,” reported Statistics Austria General Director Tobias Thomas on Thursday in the run-up to World Cancer Day on February 4th. In many types, such as malignant tumors in the stomach, intestines, lungs in men, kidneys and bladder, the risk of disease is constantly decreasing, unlike prostate cancer and lung cancer in women.
Prostate cancer is showing a “massive increase,” said Monika Hackl from Statistics Austria, head of the National Cancer Registry, at the presentation of the “Cancer Report 2023” on Thursday in Vienna. After a long-term decline, there has been a sharp increase since 2015. There has been an increase in new cases of lung cancer among women for years.
Age is a big risk factor
Overall, according to Statistics Austria, the number of new cancer cases is increasing from year to year. This is also due to the aging of the population, as age is one of the biggest risk factors. By 2030, the number of the population aged 75 plus is expected to grow by 16 percent compared to 2020, and by almost 60 percent by 2040.
In 2022, 20,683 women and 24,081 men were diagnosed with cancer. The most common diagnoses were malignant tumors of the breast in women (6,096 cases) and malignant tumors of the prostate in men (7,000 cases), followed by malignant tumors of the lung (5,203 cases, both sexes) and malignant tumors of the colon or rectum (4,467 cases). ).
Breast and prostate cancer
In 2022, breast cancer accounted for around 30 percent of new cases in women and 16 percent of all cancer deaths. Breast cancer was also the most common cause of cancer-related death in women. Prostate cancer also accounted for almost 30 percent of all newly diagnosed malignant neoplasms in men in 2022 and was responsible for around one in eight cancer deaths (13 percent) in men.
While breast cancer in women has a stable risk of disease over time and the increase is due to population growth, according to Statistics Austria, there is a more differentiated pattern for prostate cancer: a sharp increase between 1993 and 2003 was followed by a sharp decline until 2013. Since 2015 it has returned to an increase in disease rates.
Lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer
Lung cancer was the second most common new cancer case in 2022, with 2,302 cases (eleven percent) in women and 2,901 cases (twelve percent) in men. With around one in five cancer deaths, lung cancer took first place among cancer-related causes of death for men (21 percent), and for women it was now also in first place (just ahead of breast cancer) (18 and 16 percent, respectively). After a sharp increase, the risk of the disease among women has been “relatively stable” since 2016, while among men it has “been declining for years.”
The third most common location among new cases in 2022 was colon cancer with 2,028 cases (ten percent) in women and 2,439 cases (ten percent) in men. It was also responsible for almost ten percent of cancer deaths. The risk of colon cancer is significantly lower for women than for men and has fallen somewhat more sharply for men than for women in recent years. The same decline is also visible in mortality rates.
Read more: Colon cancer: colonoscopy can save lives
More and more people are living with cancer
The average five-year survival in the diagnosis period 2014 to 2018 was around 62 percent. “This means that the survival disadvantage of people with cancer is 38 percent compared to the general population,” according to Statistics Austria. Cancers of the testicles, thyroid and prostate in particular have good prognosis. Malignant tumors of the lungs, esophagus, liver and pancreas, on the other hand, have a poor or very poor prognosis.
In the period from 1983 to 2022, around 1.49 million new cancer cases were recorded in around 1.37 million people in the Austrian Cancer Registry. Of these, 402,805 were still alive at the end of 2022, 209,422 women and 193,383 men. In relation to the total population, people suffering from cancer accounted for around four percent.
Cancer prevalence, the number of people living with cancer on a given date, has been increasing for years. In 2012, 318,898 people with a cancer diagnosis lived in Austria, which was around 84,000 fewer than in 2022. This resulted in an increase in prevalence of 26 percent (women 25 percent and men 28 percent).
