Nutrition Videos

Hi! I'm Stelios Pantazis. I'm a doctor and I specialize in medical nutrition and metabolic disorders. Today, we'll see if deaths from cancer have increased over the last years. Every year, approximately ten million people in the world die from cancer, which means that in practice, one in ten deaths is caused by cancer. Has this changed over the last years? I'll start with a graph that describes in detail what we're all experiencing. This graph shows how many people die from cancer every year. We see that compared to 1970, the number has increased by 66%. Specifically, 5.7 million people died from cancer in 1970, while in 2017, the deaths reached 9.6 million. The increase certainly seems too big. On the other hand, the earth's population has increased significantly since 1970. As a result, deaths have also increased on the whole from 46 million per year to 56 million per year. Therefore, to find out if cancer has indeed increased, we have to reduce the number of deaths from cancer to 100,000 people. The second graph shows exactly this, namely the deaths from cancer per 100,000 people in the world. In this case, the increase is 17% and it reflects the real increase of deaths from cancer in relation to the increase of the population in the last 30 years. We notice that the increase is not as big as in the previous graph, but the number of people dying from cancer has certainly increased. On the other hand, as we know, cancer mainly affects old people. It has been estimated that if someone is over 70 years old, the risk of dying from cancer is 40% higher than that of a 50-year-old person. Therefore, taking into account that the number of births has significantly dropped in the last 30 years, and that the number of people that survive at an older age has significantly increased, the fairest way to find out if cancer has increased over the last decades is to adjust the results based on age too. In practice, this way, we're defining the chances that a 70-year-old person today dies from cancer compared to a 70-year-old person 30 years ago. This is what the third graph shows, which is the most complete and fair of the three graphs. In this case, the chances that someone dies from cancer today are 15 times lower than in 1990. Therefore, that's good news. Of course, this has been achieved at a huge cost of drugs and healthcare, but health is more valuable than money. However, cancer remains one of the most common causes of death. But with the efforts we've all made for prevention, early diagnosis and better treatments, we've managed to reduce the number of people dying from cancer by 15% in only 27 years. I believe that we can be optimistic that this will improve further, if we all do what owe to ourselves and the society. Namely if we take care of our health with a healthy diet, exercise and early diagnosis, we can achieve even more. Let me remind you that in Greece, the types of cancer with the highest prevalence are breast, prostate and intestinal cancer. All three affect much more often overweight people and people having an unhealthy diet. It's worth making an effort to take care of both. If you thought this was interesting, please give us a thumbs up. Share it with people who you think might find it interesting, and subscribe to our channel in order to get notified when we upload a video. You can also suggest subjects in the comment section. Thank you very much!