CHICAGO (AP) – Cancer death rates are steadily rising in certain parts of the U.S. in grim contrast with the declining death rate across the nation as a whole, an exhaustive new analysis has found.
In parts of the country that are relatively poor, and have higher rates of obesity and smoking, cancer death rates rose nearly 50 percent, while wealthier pockets of the country saw death rates fall by nearly half.
Better screening and treatment have contributed to the improvement in the nation as a whole – but the study underscores that not all Americans have benefited from these advances.
“We are going in the wrong direction,” said Ali Mokdad, the study’s lead author and a professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “We should be going forward, not backward.”
Stark differences in regional cancer death rates have been found in previous research, but this one stands out for providing detailed estimates for deaths from nearly 30 types of cancer in all 3,100 U.S. counties over 35 years.