New data from Statistics Canada, released late January, examines the age-adjusted incidence rate of cancer in Canadians, putting this figure at 563 cases per 100,000 people in 2022, making cancer the leading cause of death in Canada.
Where data is available – Quebec and Nova Scotia have not reported to the registry since 2018 and 2020, respectively – they say the overall incidence rate has been trending downwards in recent years, a decline of 0.6 per cent from 2011 to 2022 for the reporting jurisdictions.
“Lung and bronchus, breast, prostate and colorectal are the four most commonly diagnosed cancers, accounting for around half of new diagnoses annually,” the agency states in its report, Cancer incidence in Canada, 2022.
They say cancers of the lung and bronchus have been decreasing among males since 1992, declining between one and 3.1 per cent each year. Women have followed a different path with the number of lung cancer cases among women going up and down from 1992 to 2017. Since 2017, however, the incidence rate of these cancers in females has decreased annually by 3.1 per cent.
Breast cancer, meanwhile, has increased in women. “Breast cancer accounted for 28.3 per cent of all cancer cases among females in 2022,” they write. “Age-adjusted incidence decreased at 0.4 per cent per year from 1992 to 2007 but has seen a steady 0.4 per cent annual increase since then. Similar trends were observed for all age groups with recent increases ranging from 0.04 per cent to 1.3 per cent per year.”
Prostate cancer accounted for 25.5 per cent of all cancer cases in men in 2022, while colorectal cancer accounted for 10.1 per cent of all cancer cases diagnosed in the same year.
“Trends differ by age,” they state. “While incidence of colorectal cancer among males and females aged 50 years and older has been decreasing, incidence among those aged 40 to 49 has trended upward at 1.8 per cent each year from 2002 to 2022.”
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