Cancer Mortality Continues to Drop Despite Rising Incidence in Women

ATLANTA — The American Cancer Society (ACS) recently released “Cancer Statistics 2025,” the organization’s annual report on cancer facts and trends. The new findings show the cancer mortality rate declined by 34% from 1991 to 2022 in the U.S., averting approximately 4.5 million deaths. However, this steady progress is jeopardized by increasing incidence for many cancer types, especially among women and younger adults, shifting the burden of disease.

For example, incidence rates in women 50-64 years of age have surpassed those in men, and rates in women under 50 are now 82% higher than their male counterparts, up from 51% in 2002. This pattern includes lung cancer, which is now higher in women than in men among people younger than 65 years.

“Continued reductions in cancer mortality because of drops in smoking, better treatment, and earlier detection is certainly great news,” said Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of Surveillance Research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the report. “However, this progress is tempered by rising incidence in young and middle-aged women, who are often the family caregivers, and a shifting cancer burden from men to women, harkening back to the early 1900s when cancer was more common in women.”

Overall, in 2025, there will be an estimated 2,041,910 new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. (5,600 each day) and 618,120 cancer deaths. In addition to projecting the contemporary cancer burden, ACS researchers compiled the most recent findings on population-based cancer occurrence and outcomes using incidence data collected by central cancer registries (through 2021) and mortality data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics (through 2022).