PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Cancer continues to be the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people under the age of 85, according to the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) 2025 Cancer Statistics report.
This year, there will be more than 2 million new cancer diagnoses in the U.S., with about 618,000 new cancer deaths, according to ACS.
Cancer rates in women ages 50 to 64 have surpassed those in men, and rates in women under 50 are now 82% higher than their male counterparts — which is up from 51% in 2002. This pattern includes lung cancer.
“Deaths from lung cancer are greater than deaths from colorectal cancer, breast cancer and prostate cancer together. And for the first time, if you’re a woman under the age of 65, you have a greater chance of developing lung cancer than a man,” said William Dahut, ACS chief scientific officer.
He said this is likely still driven by tobacco use, though 20% of lung cancer cases among women are from non-smokers. Overall in the U.S., non-smoker lung cancer is the eighth leading cause of cancer mortality.
Andy Abramowitz, of Philadelphia, is a 52-year-old non-smoker. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in the summer of 2021. He was experiencing some leg pain, which turned out to be blood clots. Further tests showed a nodule on his lungs.
“It did feel for me, in the early weeks and even months, like things were unraveling,” he said, “like I stepped into this strange world where all the rules had changed.”
As a non-smoker, he said it felt unfair. “I didn’t get the pleasure of all those cigarettes of like a two-pack-a-day habit for all my life. Sure, I knew that there was such a thing as non-smoker lung cancer, but I had no idea — no idea — how prevalent it is.”
The report also shows rates climbing for common cancers, including breast, prostate and pancreatic. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is just 8%.
Nick Pifani, of Delran, New Jersey, is a pancreatic cancer survivor. He was diagnosed with Stage 3 in March 2017 at the age of 42. As a healthy runner and tri-athlete, he was shocked.
“I’m such a healthy person,” he said. “I’m very active and I’m young, which is, I think, one of the misnomers about pancreatic cancer, is that it just affects or impacts older people. That is certainly not the truth.”
Dahut said there is ongoing research to detect pancreatic cancer at a treatable stage, though the ACS report says progress is lagging.
“This is something that really and rightly so has gotten the attention of the scientific community, with a focus, hopefully, on really detecting pancreatic cancer earlier on, because it is a very difficult cancer to treat once it’s regionally or metastatic,” he explained.
There are also racial inequalities in cancer mortality, the report says, with death rates for Native and African Americans at least two times higher than their white counterparts.
On a positive note, the new findings show the overall cancer mortality rate declined by 34% from 1991 to 2022 in the United States.
Read the full report at cancer.org/statistics.