Cancer will soon surpass heart disease as the Number One disease-related killer in the U.S. soon unless research is able to churn out more cures, the American Association for Cancer Research said Tuesday.
With 75% of cancer diagnoses occurring in those age 55 and over and with this segment of the population increasing, the number of cancer-related deaths will increase dramatically as baby boomers age, AACR said in its third annual Cancer Progress Report.
The global incidence of cancer is expected to increase from 12.8 million in 2008 to 22.2 million in 2030, the report stated.
The rise in cancer prevalence is also tied to troublesome lifestyle issues such as tobacco use, obesity, diet, lack of physical activity, and tanning beds. AACR said half of cancer deaths are related to these preventable causes.
"Modifying personal behaviors to adopt a healthier lifestyle that eliminates or reduces these risks, where possible, could therefore, have a remarkable impact on our nation's burden of cancer," the report stated. "However, a great deal more research and resources are needed to understand how to best help individuals to change their lifestyle."
Currently, cancer is the second most common disease-related killer behind heart disease, accounting for one in every four disease-related deaths in the U.S.
Compounding the issue, the economic burden of cancer will grow dramatically as well, AACR said, a troubling thought given that the burden of cancer is already 20% higher than for any other major disease.
"Despite this sobering reality, federal policymakers can put biomedical research back on course," AACR President Charles Sawyers, MD, and Chief Executive Margaret Foti, MD, PhD, wrote in the report.
The Philadelphia-based cancer group called for Congress making the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute national priorities for funding, and ensuring increases in biomedical research equal inflation.
But automatic cuts in federal spending brought by the Budget Control Act of 2011 -- also known as sequestration -- have hit the NIH and federal funding of medical research hard.
Sequestration slashed the NIH's budget by 5.1% or $1.6 billion in March. NCI alone was hit with a $293 million cut.
Combined with no budgets increases for years prior, the NIH's spending power has fallen 20% since 2003, AACR said. As a result, NIH is funding the lowest number of research projects since 2001.
"The current course is simply unacceptable, and Congress must intervene, because the eroding support for cancer research has far-reaching negative implications," Sawyers and Foti wrote.
Research projects will be stopped, grant proposals will go unfunded, and clinical trial pipeline will dry up as a result, they said. "What is worse is the fact that diminished federal investments in cancer research come at a time when the American people most need new research advances."
AACR also said in its 2013 report that more than 1.6 million Americans will receive a cancer diagnosis this year, and more than 580,000 are expected to die from cancer. Also, 1,024,400 fewer cancer deaths have occurred since 1990 and 1991 because of declining cancer death rates.
Roughly 13.7 million cancer survivors live in the U.S.