(Carma Hassan/ CNN News) — More people are surviving cancer than ever before in the United States, according to a new report from the American Association for Cancer Research.
In the past three years, the number of cancer survivors in the US – defined as living people who have had a cancer diagnosis – increased by more than a million. There are 18 million survivors in the US as of January, with that number expected to increase to 26 million by 2040, the association said. The report notes that there were only 3 million US cancer survivors in 1971.
For all cancers combined, the five-year overall survival rate has increased from 49% in the mid-1970s to nearly 70% from 2011 to 2017, the most recent years for which data is available.
The overall cancer death rate, adjusted for age, continues to drop, with reductions between 1991 and 2019 translating into nearly 3.5 million deaths avoided, the association said. (…)