U.S. Cancer Deaths Decline but Racial Disparities Remain
While cancer death rates continue to decline in the United States, research suggests that many long-standing racial disparities in survival odds aren’t going away.First, the good news. Cancer mortality rates have dropped 33 percent since 1991, according to a new study from the American Cancer Society, published in January 2023 in CA: Cancer Journal for Clinicians. This year, an estimated 1.96 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States, and about 610,000 people will die. That’s about 3.8 million fewer deaths than the country would have seen without the sharp decline in fatalities over the years.“The downturn has occurred for 29 years now, but was especially exciting in 2020 because most other leading causes of death increased in 2020 because of the pandemic,” says Rebecca Siegel,…