5 ms·

I hate and fear cancer so much. Why does it seem like so many are dying of cancer :(

by xupybd 2y ago

zelphirkalt 2y ago
Because if nothing else gets you, cancer risk rises as you get older. At some point it gets you, I guess.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Yes, a few types are basically a numbers game. We're continuously successfully not getting them every day. But the longer we live and not die of other things, the higher chance there is of losing that game. And we're actually getting quite good and not dying of other things. Then again, cancer treatments and vaccines are progressing recently, so that's good news.
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    This sounds good, but it can't be right. There are animals that live centuries. Greenland sharks may live up to 500 years, for example. There are trees that live millenia.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      Turns out they have lower mutation rate which helps them. Their chances are much lower, but still not zero. https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/sharks-cancer-secret-also-puts-them-at-risk-study https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/sharks-cancer-secret-al...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - thfuran 2y ago
      But they aren't human. We don't survive being dessicated and heavily irradiated like a tardigrade or regrow severed limbs like starfish, and we aren't as good at avoiding cancer as some other animals.
      - cogman10 2y ago
        And some animals are worse. Dogs, for example, are most likely to die from cancer. They also get cataracts decades earlier than humans do.
      - guerrilla 2y ago
        You're supporting my point. The reason we suffer from this is not solely probabilistic. There are many other factors.
    - kragen 2y ago
      being warmblooded is a huge disadvantage for longevity
      - AlphaCharlie 2y ago
        Can you expand on that subject? What are the traits of warm blooded species that lead to higher cancer rates?
        pfdietz 2y ago
        Probably constant generation of reactive oxidizing chemicals from the higher metabolism needed to maintain body temperature.
        kragen 2y ago
        not just higher cancer rates, but higher rates of all kinds of aging-related deaths the advantage of being warm-blooded is that your metabolism is more precise and much faster, but, as james dean quoted willard motley saying, 'live fast, die young' most of the causes of aging are unwanted chemical reactions; https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2813%2900645-4 https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2813%2900... is a highly-cited paper reviewing what we knew about the causes of aging 11 years ago. chemical reactions of all kinds follow the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation which makes them happen about 2–3 times faster per 10° temperature rise (being old is a more important risk factor for cancer than anything else i can think of, even smoking and radioactive fallout) small sharks around greenland, to take an extreme example, are at essentially the temperature of the seawater, about -1.8°. larger sharks could conceivably raise their internal body temperature, but greenland sharks swim very slowly to avoid this even when they are large. so their metabolism is about 16× slower than yours is—both healing and aging processes happen slower. their gestational period is about 8–18 years
        guerrilla 2y ago
        Thank you. This is the kind of thing I was looking for. After posting, I also found out that plants are even further in the other direction because their strong cell walls prevent metasticization.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    I don't think prolonging the life in a biological body is going to be the winning route. We will have to Star Trek it up and transfer our consciousness to computers. That, or replace parts, maybe even the entirety of our bodies with a machine that can be maintained and repaired rather than age.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
I have two people in my direct circle get and have stage4 lymphoma and adult leukemia this year at the time of their initial diagnosis. Does seem like it is on the rise from my perspective.
danielvf 2y ago
Cancer (outside behavior related cancer like lung cancer) is on the rise. In spite of better treatments, a twenty year old today is more likely from cancer while in their twenties than at any time before. Each younger age cohort has an increase risk of cancer, and at younger ages. Cancer deaths overall are still going down though, as the smoking generation still alive goes out.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
layer8 2y ago
To be a little more precise, roughly 1 in 6 deaths are due to cancer. It’s the second leading cause after heart diseases, which are 1 in 3.
tacon 2y ago
On some podcast a longevity doctor asked the host to estimate how much longer the average person would live if we eliminated/cured cancer. The answer was about three years. Eliminate heart disease? Another three years. Eliminate both? About five years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  Was this a well-corroborated and fact-based opinion, or was it off-the-cuff and handwavey? Podcast answers aren't always totally reliable. But you mention "the average person," which is really the crux of the matter. Cancer strikes perfectly average people, oftentimes in their 30s or 40s, and hands down death sentences at random. A bad roll of the dice. A stray cosmic ray hit a dividing cell. Who knows? That is what is scary. Eliminating cancer may perhaps only increase the average lifespan by three years -- though I have my doubts -- but what's much more important is that it would cut down tremendously the number of premature and random-seeming deaths in the prime of life.
  - Theodores 2y ago
    The thing is that we are led to believe that cancer just strikes at random, and anecdotally we know of someone that never smoked to get lung cancer that spread everywhere to strike them dead. Yet we also know it is not quite like that. If you smoke, drink, make sculptures out of asbestos dust, eat processed meats, shoot depleted uranium rounds down at the range and work with radium in a gun sight factory then you probably have stacked the odds. Now imagine you have an identical twin, maybe not cojoined, but living with the exact same stacked odds. However, you eat a strict diet of highly processed foods and only play tiddlywinks for physical activity. Meanwhile, your twin rides eats a strict diet that is mostly whole food, plant based and gets a lot of physical activity due to a passion for dancing. One of you is going to be likely to suffer a cardiovascular event before the other and that same person is going to run the risk of catching cancer first. Now we all know that eating processed foods, maybe with the exception of processed meat, isn't going to 'give you cancer' and neither is playing tiddlywinks. Equally, a few extra antioxidants and a bit of fibre from eating a few more carrots isn't going to spare you from cancer, neither is dancing for that matter. Nonetheless, cardiovascular and gut health is important for reducing cancer risks. I say this with anecdotal evidence provided by a car dependent relative that chose not to eat a fibre rich diet and now has cancers that I would not wish on anyone, with his digestive tract having to be trimmed from the far end due to cancer. Because he took the medical route with meaty pies and moderate alcohol levels, his life might only be cut short by three years. However, by then, there will be two decades of extreme medical interventions and a smorgasbord of medications that have to be taken daily. Lifespan is not as important as healthspan and there is much we can do through diet and physical activity to maximise healthspan. The trouble with my relative is that advice to go absolutely teetotal, stay off the processed meats and to eat fibre (as in vegetables) was not a message that was well received. This advice is in line with WHO recommendations but this can be simply ignored once lifestyle choices have been decided on.
myprotegeai 2y ago
[flagged]
SpaceNoodled 2y ago
Microplastics?
kragen 2y ago
probably because it's the first, second, or third leading cause of death in every country, depending on how you slice it up, killing about a quarter of everyone
photochemsyn 2y ago
The problem of controlled cellular growth in a multicellular organism is a really hard problem that evolution has spent billions of generations on, and any cell in any of the dozens of systems that keeps the human body going can potentially escape the normal cell cycle control process and go out of control, leading to cancer. (edit: the fact that so many people lead full lives without coming down with cancer is more remarkable from this view, it's one of the miracles of life). While the ability to treat cancer using modern technology (especially if it is detected relatively early) has made vast advances, we're also surrounded by and exposed to a wide variety of molecules that can, especially in high concentrations, inflict damage on the cellular control system (a whole lot of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, cofactors, etc.) and while that damage may be somewhat random in nature, if it happens to hit a key sequence in the cell control DNA you get a cancer cell. You can greatly reduce the prevalance of such carcinogenic mutagens in the food, air, water and soil with suitable regulations but this cuts into profit margins for the producers of various commodities and products who in turn lobby governments to eliminate said regulations (which to be fair may not have been well-designed or implemented). Yes there are genetic factors which may increase one's cancer risk but these are very complicated and often overemphasized by those who dont't want to see clean air, water, soil, food etc. regulations implemented.
- rlpb 2y ago
  > ...a really hard problem that evolution has spent billions of generations on... I think it's worth noting that this isn't evolution's "goal". We just need to produce offspring and give them a good start in life such that they are competitively successful. Beyond that, evolution doesn't care. Even for that, there's a budget. If it's not economical over letting us die and not taking valuable resources from our offspring, then evolution also doesn't care.
  - photochemsyn 2y ago
    That could suggest why longevity in humans (or primates ) was under active selection, as they put a lot of effort into raising the children so you'd expect that cancer in younger people would result in the death of their children, so evolution selects for robust anti-cancer systems (like the human immune system, which is relatively good at detecting and eliminating cancer cells as well as pathogenic bacteria, etc.). These explanations are however always a bit hand-wavy, eg why do galapagos tortoises live to 150 when they don't seem to do much parental investment?
j33zusjuice 2y ago
Because they are.
jmcgough 2y ago
You become a lot more aware of it as you get older, and what you see to some degree depends a lot on your socioeconomic status. A big part of it is that we've made so much progress when it comes to heart disease. Most people who go to my hospital are on public insurance, and they're dying more frequently from lifestyle-related diseases (like T2DM which leads to hypertension, chronic kidney disease, and congestive heart failure) https://www.clubvita.net/us/news-and-insights/top-charts-23-10-us-cause-of-death-by-socio-economic-status-over-time-1 https://www.clubvita.net/us/news-and-insights/top-charts-23-...
Yawrehto 2y ago
TL;DR: Because today, people are regularly living long enough to get it. It's often a good sign to have higher cancer rates -- societies with higher cancer rates are richer, happier, and live longer than those with lower cancer rates. I mean, cancer is bad. But it's a good sign for society if lots of people die of cancer -- they tend to hit the elderly. Historically, about 80 percent of people who die of cancer are over 50, and that's fairly constant. (Interestingly, the share of cancer deaths that are in people over 70 have been rising, from about 36 percent to 49 percent - that's as a portion of the total.)[1] The ranking for prevalence of cancer is higher income countries, upper-middle-income countries, lower-middle-income countries, and finally with the lowest rates low-income countries. Since the world is getting richer, it stands to reason that it's likely there will be higher cancer rates (of course, it's not guaranteed; it's possible being European makes you more likely to get cancer, which would explain the higher rankings of high-income countries, which are often European, but not lead to higher numbers elsewhere).[2] This is borne out individually. Countries with the lowest rates of cancer tend not to be great places to live. Our World In Data has three countries[2] tied for the lowest cancer rates (0.1 percent), Niger, Chad and Benin, which have life expectancies of 62, 53, and 60[3][4] and had happiness scores (self-reported life satisfaction) of 4.56, 4.47, and 4.38 (out of 10; for reference, the world average is 5.27, with numbers for individual countries ranging from 7.74 to 1.72) respectively.[5] The full list of countries with a prevalence of cancer below 0.5 percent is as follows: Niger, Chad, Benin, Gambia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Liberia, Angola, Guinea, Cameroon Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, East Timor, Tajikistan, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Oman, Sudan, Nepal, Kenya, Mauritania, Maldives, Bhutan, South Sudan, Ghana, Vanuatu, Equatorial Guinea, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Solomon Islands, Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea, Malawi, Rwanda, Laos, India, Uganda, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Djibouti, Congo, Botswana, Zambia, Kiribati, Lesotho, Algeria, Gabon, Mongolia, Eswatini, Morocco, Comoros, Honduras, Haiti, Samoa, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, Marshall Islands, Namibia, Philippines, Egypt, Cambodia, Indonesia[2] The happiest of those is Guatemala, at 6.29, and a prevalence of 0.4 percent. But most of them are much less happy. To take a random example (I used random.org to randomize the list and chose the top one and the top six, excluding Sao Tome which had no happiness data), Uganda is at 4.37, and the average of Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan is 4.41, nearly a point below the world average. Life expectancy is no better; again doing Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan, Uganda had a life expectancy of 62.7 years, and the average of them is 66.2, almost 5 years below the world average of 71 (range of typical life expectancy is from 85.9 to 52.5). Okay, so life expectancy and happiness are both lower for countries with lower rates of cancer, seemingly. What about those with higher rates? Well, those with cancer rates up to or including 3 percent are as follows: Monaco, Bermuda, Italy, France, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Denmark, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Spain, Estonia, Canada, Norway, Andorra, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Belgium, Iceland, Switzerland. Monaco comes in at the top, with 5.9 percent with some type of cancer. Monaco has a life expectancy of 85.9 years, the highest. In the world. There was no happiness data available for it or the runner-up Bermuda, but Italy ranked itself at 6.32. Of the top five countries in life expectancy that show up on the cancer list at all (Monaco, not Hong Kong or Macao, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Malta), all of them but Malta show up on the list, and Malta just misses the cutoff (2.9 percent). In happiness (Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Israel), Sweden and Israel aren't ranked. Sweden just misses the cutoff at 2.9 and Israel is at 1.6 percent but has a notably much younger population than any of the others. Again using random.org and taking the top one and then the follow-up four, Monaco came in at number one (data already covered and missing happiness, so excluded), followed by the US, Switzerland, Iceland, Australia, and Italy. The US has a life expectancy of 77.2 years. The average for the five is 82.26, so if it were a country it would be number 21 globally and over TEN YEARS above the world average of 71, above even the Oceanian average (the highest) of 79.4; for happiness, the US is number 18 worldwide excluding ties, ranking itself at 6.72; the average is 6.938, meaning if it were a country it would come in number fourteen including ties and almost two points above the world average of 5.08. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-deaths-by-age https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-deaths-by-age [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-cancer-crude https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-... [3] Rounded to the nearest whole number [4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy [5] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder

I hate and fear cancer so much. Why does it seem like so many are dying of cancer :(

by xupybd 2y ago

I hate and fear cancer so much. Why does it seem like so many are dying of cancer :(

zelphirkalt 2y ago

Because if nothing else gets you, cancer risk rises as you get older. At some point it gets you, I guess.

viraptor 2y ago
Yes, a few types are basically a numbers game. We're continuously successfully not getting them every day. But the longer we live and not die of other things, the higher chance there is of losing that game. And we're actually getting quite good and not dying of other things. Then again, cancer treatments and vaccines are progressing recently, so that's good news.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  This sounds good, but it can't be right. There are animals that live centuries. Greenland sharks may live up to 500 years, for example. There are trees that live millenia.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Turns out they have lower mutation rate which helps them. Their chances are much lower, but still not zero. https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/sharks-cancer-secret-also-puts-them-at-risk-study https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/sharks-cancer-secret-al...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - thfuran 2y ago
    But they aren't human. We don't survive being dessicated and heavily irradiated like a tardigrade or regrow severed limbs like starfish, and we aren't as good at avoiding cancer as some other animals.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      And some animals are worse. Dogs, for example, are most likely to die from cancer. They also get cataracts decades earlier than humans do.
    - guerrilla 2y ago
      You're supporting my point. The reason we suffer from this is not solely probabilistic. There are many other factors.
  - kragen 2y ago
    being warmblooded is a huge disadvantage for longevity
    - AlphaCharlie 2y ago
      Can you expand on that subject? What are the traits of warm blooded species that lead to higher cancer rates?
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Probably constant generation of reactive oxidizing chemicals from the higher metabolism needed to maintain body temperature.
      - kragen 2y ago
        not just higher cancer rates, but higher rates of all kinds of aging-related deaths the advantage of being warm-blooded is that your metabolism is more precise and much faster, but, as james dean quoted willard motley saying, 'live fast, die young' most of the causes of aging are unwanted chemical reactions; https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2813%2900645-4 https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2813%2900... is a highly-cited paper reviewing what we knew about the causes of aging 11 years ago. chemical reactions of all kinds follow the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation which makes them happen about 2–3 times faster per 10° temperature rise (being old is a more important risk factor for cancer than anything else i can think of, even smoking and radioactive fallout) small sharks around greenland, to take an extreme example, are at essentially the temperature of the seawater, about -1.8°. larger sharks could conceivably raise their internal body temperature, but greenland sharks swim very slowly to avoid this even when they are large. so their metabolism is about 16× slower than yours is—both healing and aging processes happen slower. their gestational period is about 8–18 years
        guerrilla 2y ago
        Thank you. This is the kind of thing I was looking for. After posting, I also found out that plants are even further in the other direction because their strong cell walls prevent metasticization.
- freedomben 2y ago
  I don't think prolonging the life in a biological body is going to be the winning route. We will have to Star Trek it up and transfer our consciousness to computers. That, or replace parts, maybe even the entirety of our bodies with a machine that can be maintained and repaired rather than age.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

I have two people in my direct circle get and have stage4 lymphoma and adult leukemia this year at the time of their initial diagnosis. Does seem like it is on the rise from my perspective.

danielvf 2y ago

Cancer (outside behavior related cancer like lung cancer) is on the rise. In spite of better treatments, a twenty year old today is more likely from cancer while in their twenties than at any time before. Each younger age cohort has an increase risk of cancer, and at younger ages. Cancer deaths overall are still going down though, as the smoking generation still alive goes out.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

layer8 2y ago

To be a little more precise, roughly 1 in 6 deaths are due to cancer. It’s the second leading cause after heart diseases, which are 1 in 3.

tacon 2y ago

On some podcast a longevity doctor asked the host to estimate how much longer the average person would live if we eliminated/cured cancer. The answer was about three years. Eliminate heart disease? Another three years. Eliminate both? About five years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
Was this a well-corroborated and fact-based opinion, or was it off-the-cuff and handwavey? Podcast answers aren't always totally reliable. But you mention "the average person," which is really the crux of the matter. Cancer strikes perfectly average people, oftentimes in their 30s or 40s, and hands down death sentences at random. A bad roll of the dice. A stray cosmic ray hit a dividing cell. Who knows? That is what is scary. Eliminating cancer may perhaps only increase the average lifespan by three years -- though I have my doubts -- but what's much more important is that it would cut down tremendously the number of premature and random-seeming deaths in the prime of life.
- Theodores 2y ago
  The thing is that we are led to believe that cancer just strikes at random, and anecdotally we know of someone that never smoked to get lung cancer that spread everywhere to strike them dead. Yet we also know it is not quite like that. If you smoke, drink, make sculptures out of asbestos dust, eat processed meats, shoot depleted uranium rounds down at the range and work with radium in a gun sight factory then you probably have stacked the odds. Now imagine you have an identical twin, maybe not cojoined, but living with the exact same stacked odds. However, you eat a strict diet of highly processed foods and only play tiddlywinks for physical activity. Meanwhile, your twin rides eats a strict diet that is mostly whole food, plant based and gets a lot of physical activity due to a passion for dancing. One of you is going to be likely to suffer a cardiovascular event before the other and that same person is going to run the risk of catching cancer first. Now we all know that eating processed foods, maybe with the exception of processed meat, isn't going to 'give you cancer' and neither is playing tiddlywinks. Equally, a few extra antioxidants and a bit of fibre from eating a few more carrots isn't going to spare you from cancer, neither is dancing for that matter. Nonetheless, cardiovascular and gut health is important for reducing cancer risks. I say this with anecdotal evidence provided by a car dependent relative that chose not to eat a fibre rich diet and now has cancers that I would not wish on anyone, with his digestive tract having to be trimmed from the far end due to cancer. Because he took the medical route with meaty pies and moderate alcohol levels, his life might only be cut short by three years. However, by then, there will be two decades of extreme medical interventions and a smorgasbord of medications that have to be taken daily. Lifespan is not as important as healthspan and there is much we can do through diet and physical activity to maximise healthspan. The trouble with my relative is that advice to go absolutely teetotal, stay off the processed meats and to eat fibre (as in vegetables) was not a message that was well received. This advice is in line with WHO recommendations but this can be simply ignored once lifestyle choices have been decided on.

myprotegeai 2y ago

[flagged]

SpaceNoodled 2y ago

Microplastics?

kragen 2y ago

probably because it's the first, second, or third leading cause of death in every country, depending on how you slice it up, killing about a quarter of everyone

photochemsyn 2y ago

The problem of controlled cellular growth in a multicellular organism is a really hard problem that evolution has spent billions of generations on, and any cell in any of the dozens of systems that keeps the human body going can potentially escape the normal cell cycle control process and go out of control, leading to cancer. (edit: the fact that so many people lead full lives without coming down with cancer is more remarkable from this view, it's one of the miracles of life). While the ability to treat cancer using modern technology (especially if it is detected relatively early) has made vast advances, we're also surrounded by and exposed to a wide variety of molecules that can, especially in high concentrations, inflict damage on the cellular control system (a whole lot of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, cofactors, etc.) and while that damage may be somewhat random in nature, if it happens to hit a key sequence in the cell control DNA you get a cancer cell. You can greatly reduce the prevalance of such carcinogenic mutagens in the food, air, water and soil with suitable regulations but this cuts into profit margins for the producers of various commodities and products who in turn lobby governments to eliminate said regulations (which to be fair may not have been well-designed or implemented). Yes there are genetic factors which may increase one's cancer risk but these are very complicated and often overemphasized by those who dont't want to see clean air, water, soil, food etc. regulations implemented.

rlpb 2y ago
> ...a really hard problem that evolution has spent billions of generations on... I think it's worth noting that this isn't evolution's "goal". We just need to produce offspring and give them a good start in life such that they are competitively successful. Beyond that, evolution doesn't care. Even for that, there's a budget. If it's not economical over letting us die and not taking valuable resources from our offspring, then evolution also doesn't care.
- photochemsyn 2y ago
  That could suggest why longevity in humans (or primates ) was under active selection, as they put a lot of effort into raising the children so you'd expect that cancer in younger people would result in the death of their children, so evolution selects for robust anti-cancer systems (like the human immune system, which is relatively good at detecting and eliminating cancer cells as well as pathogenic bacteria, etc.). These explanations are however always a bit hand-wavy, eg why do galapagos tortoises live to 150 when they don't seem to do much parental investment?

j33zusjuice 2y ago

Because they are.

jmcgough 2y ago

You become a lot more aware of it as you get older, and what you see to some degree depends a lot on your socioeconomic status. A big part of it is that we've made so much progress when it comes to heart disease. Most people who go to my hospital are on public insurance, and they're dying more frequently from lifestyle-related diseases (like T2DM which leads to hypertension, chronic kidney disease, and congestive heart failure) https://www.clubvita.net/us/news-and-insights/top-charts-23-10-us-cause-of-death-by-socio-economic-status-over-time-1 https://www.clubvita.net/us/news-and-insights/top-charts-23-...

Yawrehto 2y ago

TL;DR: Because today, people are regularly living long enough to get it. It's often a good sign to have higher cancer rates -- societies with higher cancer rates are richer, happier, and live longer than those with lower cancer rates. I mean, cancer is bad. But it's a good sign for society if lots of people die of cancer -- they tend to hit the elderly. Historically, about 80 percent of people who die of cancer are over 50, and that's fairly constant. (Interestingly, the share of cancer deaths that are in people over 70 have been rising, from about 36 percent to 49 percent - that's as a portion of the total.)[1] The ranking for prevalence of cancer is higher income countries, upper-middle-income countries, lower-middle-income countries, and finally with the lowest rates low-income countries. Since the world is getting richer, it stands to reason that it's likely there will be higher cancer rates (of course, it's not guaranteed; it's possible being European makes you more likely to get cancer, which would explain the higher rankings of high-income countries, which are often European, but not lead to higher numbers elsewhere).[2] This is borne out individually. Countries with the lowest rates of cancer tend not to be great places to live. Our World In Data has three countries[2] tied for the lowest cancer rates (0.1 percent), Niger, Chad and Benin, which have life expectancies of 62, 53, and 60[3][4] and had happiness scores (self-reported life satisfaction) of 4.56, 4.47, and 4.38 (out of 10; for reference, the world average is 5.27, with numbers for individual countries ranging from 7.74 to 1.72) respectively.[5] The full list of countries with a prevalence of cancer below 0.5 percent is as follows: Niger, Chad, Benin, Gambia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Liberia, Angola, Guinea, Cameroon Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, East Timor, Tajikistan, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Oman, Sudan, Nepal, Kenya, Mauritania, Maldives, Bhutan, South Sudan, Ghana, Vanuatu, Equatorial Guinea, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Solomon Islands, Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea, Malawi, Rwanda, Laos, India, Uganda, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Djibouti, Congo, Botswana, Zambia, Kiribati, Lesotho, Algeria, Gabon, Mongolia, Eswatini, Morocco, Comoros, Honduras, Haiti, Samoa, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, Marshall Islands, Namibia, Philippines, Egypt, Cambodia, Indonesia[2] The happiest of those is Guatemala, at 6.29, and a prevalence of 0.4 percent. But most of them are much less happy. To take a random example (I used random.org to randomize the list and chose the top one and the top six, excluding Sao Tome which had no happiness data), Uganda is at 4.37, and the average of Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan is 4.41, nearly a point below the world average. Life expectancy is no better; again doing Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan, Uganda had a life expectancy of 62.7 years, and the average of them is 66.2, almost 5 years below the world average of 71 (range of typical life expectancy is from 85.9 to 52.5). Okay, so life expectancy and happiness are both lower for countries with lower rates of cancer, seemingly. What about those with higher rates? Well, those with cancer rates up to or including 3 percent are as follows: Monaco, Bermuda, Italy, France, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Denmark, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Spain, Estonia, Canada, Norway, Andorra, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Belgium, Iceland, Switzerland. Monaco comes in at the top, with 5.9 percent with some type of cancer. Monaco has a life expectancy of 85.9 years, the highest. In the world. There was no happiness data available for it or the runner-up Bermuda, but Italy ranked itself at 6.32. Of the top five countries in life expectancy that show up on the cancer list at all (Monaco, not Hong Kong or Macao, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Malta), all of them but Malta show up on the list, and Malta just misses the cutoff (2.9 percent). In happiness (Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Israel), Sweden and Israel aren't ranked. Sweden just misses the cutoff at 2.9 and Israel is at 1.6 percent but has a notably much younger population than any of the others. Again using random.org and taking the top one and then the follow-up four, Monaco came in at number one (data already covered and missing happiness, so excluded), followed by the US, Switzerland, Iceland, Australia, and Italy. The US has a life expectancy of 77.2 years. The average for the five is 82.26, so if it were a country it would be number 21 globally and over TEN YEARS above the world average of 71, above even the Oceanian average (the highest) of 79.4; for happiness, the US is number 18 worldwide excluding ties, ranking itself at 6.72; the average is 6.938, meaning if it were a country it would come in number fourteen including ties and almost two points above the world average of 5.08. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-deaths-by-age https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-deaths-by-age [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-cancer-crude https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-... [3] Rounded to the nearest whole number [4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy [5] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder