• 10/10/2006
  • England
  • staff
  • The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk)

Cancer cases will rise by a third by 2020, increasing the burden on the NHS, experts have said.

The total number of people newly diagnosed each year will go from 224,000 in 2003 to 299,000 in 2020 – a rise of 33%, Professor Henrik Moller predicted.

National Cancer Director Professor Mike Richards said the findings were “incredibly important” and were being used for planning radiotherapy.

Presenting his figures at the National Cancer Research Institute conference in Birmingham, Prof Moller, a professor of cancer epidemiology at King’s College, London, said the rise was largely due to an ageing population.

The number of cases will go up because there will be more people and cancer patients will live longer, but the chance of contracting cancer will largely stay the same.

Currently around one in three people in Britain will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lives.

Prof Moller’s predictions showed that the number of annual cases of cancer in men will go from 111,639 in 2001 to 152,381 in 2020, a rise of 36%.

For women, the figures will go from 112,477 new cases a year in 2001 to 146,500 in 2020, a rise of 30%.

For the same period, mouth cancer cases will go up 75% in men and 57% in women. Cases of oesophageal cancer will go up 58% in men and 21% in women, rectal cancer cases will go up 52% in men and 35% in women, and prostate cancer in men will go up 48%, or an additional 15,000 cases a year. Breast cancer cases in women will go up by 48% between 2001 and 2020 – an average of 15,000 extra cases a year.

Prof Moller said the predictions were based in 35 years of cancer registration in England.