Data stories · 33 cancer types
Cancer, in data
Which cancers are the most common? Which are the deadliest? Where is medicine winning, and which cancers are rare? Official figures for every major cancer, explained for everyone.
01 · The scale
points of light
Each one is 2,000 people diagnosed with cancer in : people across the cancer types on this site. Move your cursor through them.
02 · Most common
lead
The most common cancers make up % of all cases. The other types stay behind as a faint glow. Hover over a row to explore it, or click to open its story.
03 · Deadliest
Now, light up the deaths
In orange: deaths in the same year, for every 100 people diagnosed.
03 · Deadliest
From to in every 100
It's a rough measure, since it doesn't follow individual patients, but it shows which cancers are still hardest to treat.
04 · Progress toward a cure
Where medicine is winning
5-year relative survival in the United States: people diagnosed in (grey) compared with people diagnosed in (coloured). Some cancers have been transformed. Others have barely moved.
Source: SEER, the US National Cancer Institute registry, which covers the cancers with long-term records. US survival is higher than in many countries, but its trends show what progress looks like.
In Spain: change in the death rate since 2000
Age-standardised deaths per 100,000, average of 1999–2001 compared with the last three years (IARC Cancer Over Time, WHO Mortality Database). Hover over a row for the rates.
05 · Research
Not every cancer gets its share of research
Each dot is a cancer: how many people it kills each year, and how many clinical trials are testing new treatments for it right now. Cancers that kill more people tend to get more trials, as the dashed line shows. Orange dots fall below that line: they get less research than their death toll would suggest.
Active interventional trials on ClinicalTrials.gov that list each cancer among their conditions, retrieved . Trials that test one drug on several cancers count for each of them, which inflates rarer cancers. Deaths from GLOBOCAN .
06 · The future
cases a year by
If today's cancer rates stay the same, a growing and ageing world population alone would raise new cases by % and deaths by % by . The cancers that mostly affect older people grow the fastest.
Growth in new cases, –
Projected increase if rates stay at today's level. Hover over a row for the numbers, or click it to open the story.
Source: IARC Cancer Tomorrow. These are not forecasts of risk: prevention, screening and better treatment can bend these lines, as they already have for some cancers.
07 · Rare cancers
of are rare
A cancer is usually called rare when fewer than 6 people in every 100,000 are diagnosed with it each year. Rare cancers are harder to study, so they get less research and fewer specialist doctors. Together, though, they affect people a year.
New cases per 100,000 people per year, worldwide, crude rate (log scale). For cancers that affect only one sex, the rate is per 100,000 people of that sex. Some cancers that are rare worldwide, like melanoma, are common in some regions.
08 · Explore
cancers, one story each
Pick a cancer to see who it affects, where in the world, how survival depends on catching it early and how that has changed. Besides the main cancers, there are cell types and rarer cancers that world estimates don't cover, such as osteosarcoma, the leukaemia subtypes or retinoblastoma. Their figures come from cancer registries.