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The mortality-to-incidence ratio for India was 64.47 per cent in 2022, the highest while comparing the top 10 countries with the highest number of cancer incidences.
The Budget for 2025-2026 announced steps to fight cancer in India, one of the worst affected countries in terms of cases and deaths.
Steps proposed included establishing day care cancer centres in all district hospitals in three years and full exemption of cancer treatment drugs from basic customs duty.
As many as three out of five Indians diagnosed with cancer died of the disease in 2022, according to a recent study by the Indian Council of Medical Research.
Data from the Global Cancer Observatory (GLOBOCAN) 2022 show that India is third after China and the United States in terms of absolute number of cancer incidences globally, according to a study published in The Lancet Regional Health - Southeast Asia.
India's mortality-to-incidence ratio (cancer mortalities compared to cancer incidences) was 64.47 per cent in 2022, the highest among the 10 countries with the highest number of cancer incidences.
Indonesia (58.66 per cent), China (50.57 per cent) and Russia (47.34 per cent) followed India.
The US had more people with cancer but it had a mortality-to-incidence ratio of 23.81 per cent, significantly lower than India.
India had 889,742 cancer deaths in 2022, second only to China's 2.32 million deaths.
Breast cancer was the most prevalent cancer in Indian females with 31.1 per cent of new cases, followed by cervical (19.6 per cent) and ovarian (7 per cent) cancer.
Breast (24 per cent) and cervical (20.6 per cent) were the leading causes of cancer-related mortalities in females.
Among males, oral cancer was the most commonly diagnosed (24.3 per cent) and the leading cause of cancer-related mortality (21.6 per cent).
Data on gender and cancer in India shows that in 2022 the female crude incidence rate (CIR) in the reproductive age group (60.08) was higher compared to the male CIR of 37.25 in the same age group.
CIR for males aged 70 or more was 640.08, considerably higher than geriatric (above 70 years) female CIR of 456.02 in 2022.
Crude mortality rate (CMR) for females in the reproductive age group (27.65) was greater than males (20.87).
In all other age groups, male CMR was worse than female. CIR and CMR refer to the proportion of total cancer incidences/mortalities out of total population expressed per 1,00,000 individuals.
The Lancet study projected that cancer-related mortalities in India will increase 2 per cent annually over the next two decades, as the population transitions from the reproductive age group (15 to 49 years) to the middle-aged (50 to 69 years) and geriatric (above 70 years) counterparts.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
