The number of people suffering from cancer has jumped to 352,000 a year with an aging population the main reason for a 12 per cent rise in cases over the last two decades.
More than 179,000 men are diagnosed yearly in the UK compared with nearly 173,000 women.
Although the chance of getting the disease is higher than ever survival rates have doubled since the mid-1990s, according to new figures released by Cancer Research UK today (Wednesday).
Better treatments, more accurate tests, earlier diagnosis and screening programmes are giving people greater hope they can defeat cancer - and cancer death rates in the UK have fallen by nearly 10 per cent over 10 years.
However, survival rates for lung, pancreatic and oesophageal cancer are examples are still low - partly because they tend to be diagnosed at a later stage when they’re much harder to treat.
Nick Ormiston-Smith, from Cancer Research UK, said: “People are living longer so more people are getting cancer. But the good news is more people are surviving their cancer. There’s still a huge variation in survival between different cancer types and there’s a lot of work to do to reach [our] ambition for three in four patients to survive their disease by 2034.”
