While cancer mortality rates show a steady decline, the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) Cancer Statistics, 2025 report draws concern around incident rates increasing among women and young adults.
The annual report found that cancer mortality rates in the United States have decreased by 34 percent from 1991 to 2022, which the researchers estimated to prevent approximately 4.5 million deaths. However, the report also found an increasing incidence for many cancer types, particularly among women and young adults. The findings also underscore persistent racial inequalities.
Additional findings include:
- Death rates among women are increasing for cancers of the oral cavity, pancreas, uterine corpus, and liver.
- Incident rates among women aged 50-64 has surpassed rates among men.
- Younger women have an 82 percent higher incidence rate than their male counterparts, a 51 percent jump from 2002.
- In 2025, it is projected that there will be 2,041,910 new cancer cases and 618,120 cancer deaths in the United States.
- Cancer mortality rates among Native American people are up to three times higher compared to white people for kidney, liver, stomach, and cervical cancers.
- Black people are twice as likely to die of prostate, stomach, and uterine corpus cancers compared to white people, and 50 percent more likely to die from cervical cancer, which researchers noted is preventable.
- Rates of new diagnoses of colorectal cancer in men and women under 65 years old and cervical cancer in women aged 30-44 has also increased.
“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, surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the report, in a statement. “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.”
The American Cancer Society said progress against cancer requires increased investment in prevention and treatment, especially for uterine corpus and pancreatic cancer, and addressing disparities through expanded access to high-quality care, with emphasis on American Indian and Alaska Native and Black communities, wrote the researchers.