• Question: Hi there, what’s the most common cancer?

    Asked by anon-327764 on 10 Jun 2022. This question was also asked by anon-327775.
    • Photo: Zahra Massoud

      Zahra Massoud answered on 10 Jun 2022: last edited 10 Jun 2022 2:02 pm

      In the UK, breast cancer is the most commonly occurring

    • Photo: Karin Purshouse

      Karin Purshouse answered on 10 Jun 2022: last edited 10 Jun 2022 2:12 pm

      Just to embellish that further, breast is the most common overall, and prostate is the commonest in men. The four commonest cancers are breast, prostate, lung and bowel cancer.

    • Photo: Seung Hyun Lee

      Seung Hyun Lee answered on 13 Jun 2022:

      It depends. Commonality of cancers can be analysed in different angles, but some common follow-up questions worth thinking about may be gender, age, where, and a variable of time.

      The commonest cancers in the UK over the past five years may differ from the ones in Korea over the same period. The commonest cancers in the UK 50 years ago compared to 2021 would be different. Likewise, the commonest cancers occurring in children or young adults are vastly different from ones occurring in older people.

      To give you an example, top three commonest cancers worldwide for for men and women combined and all ages combined are: breast cancer, lung cancer and large bowel cancers; this is based on data on newly occurred cancers in 2020, collected by the World Health Organisation. Some of globally commonest cancers overlap while some differ from the commonest cancers in the UK, which Zahra and Karin described on point.

      If this interests you, epidemiology is a specific branch of study that asks similar questions – how frequently do diseases such as cancers occur (in specific area or population)? Is there any pattern of disease occurrence we can identify? Are there any potential underlying causes that explain this pattern?

      As you can imagine, epidemiology is a powerful tool to influence health of a large number of people (public health), by finding risk factors or causes, and strategies to prevent or mitigate diseases. To illustrate, two landmark epidemiology studies back in 1950s that identified smoking as one of the major causes leading to lung cancer; this was able to positively influence public health strategies to improve the number of this deadly cancer.

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