More than 78,400 people in Belgium were diagnosed with cancer last year. The number of diagnoses in Belgium was never so high. At the same time, the number of people dying from cancer is falling. Survival rates for certain cancers have risen sharply, thanks, in part, to improved treatments.
According to the Belgian Cancer Registry, 78,416 people - 42,831 men and 35,585 women - received a cancer diagnosis last year. The figures from the Cancer Registry Foundation appeared in daily Het Laatste Nieuws. The figure is up 2,196 on the year. The number of cancer diagnoses continues to rise year on year, but that does not mean the risk of cancer is also rising.
There are several explanations for the high number of diagnoses, says Liesbet Van Eycken of the Cancer Registry Foundation. "The population continues to increase in size. That's one of the first reasons, but the main reason is that we are all getting older. Getting older is the biggest risk when it comes to getting cancer. Of course, we continue to screen the population. In men, the actual risk of cancer has barely increased, but among women it has increased more markedly and that is due to an increasing risk of lung cancer in women."
"The real risk of cancer lies mainly in age. We get older and certain mechanisms start working less well and we are more prone to develop cancers. In that sense, we think it is a natural consequence of getting older."
More melanomas, testicular cancer and pancreatic cancer
Among men, prostate cancer is most common, with more than 12,500 cases per year. Among women, it is breast cancer with more than 11,000 new cases per year.
"In second place we find lung cancer in both men and women. Every year, we see more than 5,500 cases in men and about 3,700 in women, which is quite a number. Colorectal cancer ranks third, if we take men and women together, that’s about 8,000 new cases a year."
Melanoma (skin cancer), testicular cancer and pancreatic cancer are still on the rise. "And we can't always just pinpoint the reason for that increase," says Ms Van Eycken.
But chances of being cured continue to rise
Still, there is also a brighter side. The chance of being cured of cancer continued to increase over the years. 10 years ago, some 27,000 Belgians died of cancer every year; by 2021 - the most recent figures available - there were 25,839 deaths.
"We can attribute that to the combination of a whole number of factors," Van Eycken explains. "If we find it early, cancer is more treatable and the prognosis is also better. A lot of screening programmes have been set up to detect cancers at an early stage."
"We are having to start attributing this progress mainly to better treatments, both in surgery (where a lot of techniques have improved) and in radiotherapy (where more innovative techniques are used)."
According to Ms Van Eycken, there has also been a breakthrough in systemic therapy. "That's what we call chemotherapy. That has changed completely. Immunotherapy has certainly caused breakthroughs, like for lung cancer, where we used to have a poor prognosis, but which have now sometimes improved spectacularly."