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Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990

How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States? To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States.

The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then.

However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone.

What if we adjust for the increased age of the US population? The red line, the age-standardized rate, shows this. It shows the cancer death rate if the age structure of the US population was held constant throughout.

This shows a slight rise until 1990 and then a significant decline; rates have fallen by one-third. This means Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990.

This reduction comes from several factors: better screening and earlier diagnosis, medical advances in cancer treatments, and public health efforts to reduce risk factors like smoking and exposure to carcinogens.

You can read much more about this topic on our recently revamped page on cancer:

You can also explore the trends for other countries in this interactive chart:

The chart below shows a historical view of reported cancer death rates since 1950 in the United States. You can see several major changes: Lung cancer rose and fell greatly. Colorectal & stomach cancer had been the two most common cancer causes of death, but both have declined greatly over time.

There has been a substantial decline in age-standardized death rates from stomach cancer over time. In the United States, the death rate of stomach cancer was around 9 times lower in 2021 than it was in 1950. ourworldindata.org/grapher/stom...

It’s likely that stomach cancer declined without specific interventions but rather over time due to general improvements in clean water and sanitation, food safety practices, antibiotics, and hygiene.

Since the 1990s, when the bacterium was identified as its cause, doctors have used screening, testing, and antibiotic treatment to prevent their progression into stomach cancer in individuals.