Between 1991 and 2022, cancer deaths in the United States dropped 34% overall, according to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Statistics, 2025. Researchers estimate that this year will see slightly more than 2 million new cancer diagnoses and 618,120 cancer deaths. Parsing the data, the report notes that cases are increasing among women and young adults. Additional highlights from the report include:

 

  • Incidence rates among women ages 50 to 64 have surpassed those in men, and rates in women under 50 are now 82% higher than among their male counterparts, up from 51% in 2002.
  • Lung cancer is now more common in women than in men among people younger than 65.
  • Alarming inequalities in cancer mortality persist, notably for Native Americans and Black people.
  • Mortality rates are increasing for oral, pancreatic and endometrial cancers as well as for liver cancer among women.
  • New diagnoses of colorectal cancer among men and women younger than 65 and cervical cancer among women ages 30 to 44 have also increased.
  • Mortality rates have dropped by 70% for children and by 63% for adolescents since 1970, thanks to better treatment for leukemia.
  • Cancer incidence among children 14 and younger declined in recent years after decades of increasing rates but continued to rise among adolescents ages 15 to 19.

 

“Continued reductions in cancer mortality because of drops in smoking, better treatment and earlier detection is certainly great news,” says Rebecca Siegel, MPH, a researcher at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the report. “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, hearkening back to the early 1900s.”