Cancer Prevention, Screening Advances Are Saving Lives

Improvements in cancer prevention and screening over the last several decades have resulted in significant drops in mortality in five cancer types.

A recent study in JAMA Oncology looked at deaths from breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancer that were averted by the combination of prevention, screening and treatment advances. NCI researchers focused on these five cancers because they are among the most common causes of cancer deaths, and strategies exist for their prevention, early detection and/or treatment. In recent years, these five cancers have made up nearly half of all new cancer diagnoses and deaths.

“The surprise here is how much prevention and screening contribute to reductions in mortality,” said co-lead investigator Dr. Katrina A. B. Goddard, director of NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences. “Eight out of 10 deaths from these five cancers that were averted over the past 45 years were due to advances in prevention and screening.”

A single prevention intervention, smoking cessation, contributed significantly to averting deaths—more than 3 million from lung cancer alone. When considering each cancer site individually, prevention and screening accounted for most deaths averted for cervical, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancer, whereas treatment advances accounted for most deaths averted from breast cancer.

The researchers used statistical models from the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) and cancer mortality data to estimate the relative contributions of prevention, screening, and treatment advances to deaths averted from breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancers between 1975 and 2020.

In total, the modeling showed, 5.94 million deaths were averted from these five cancers between 1975 and 2020. Of these, prevention and screening interventions accounted 80% of the averted deaths.