Breast cancer cases around the world are forecast to rise by about 50 per cent in a generation, with Middle East countries likely to be among the most affected, a study claims.
Breast cancer remains the most common kind among women worldwide and leading cause of premature death, with annual new cases expected to rise from 2.3 million in 2023 to more than 3.5 million by 2050.
The death toll in that period is expected to rise from 764,000 to nearly 1.4 million, according to the latest analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study Breast Cancer Collaborators, published in The Lancet Oncology.
The findings suggest that maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including not smoking, getting sufficient physical activity, lowering red meat consumption, and having a healthy weight may prevent more than a quarter of healthy years lost to illness and premature death due to breast cancer.
They call for an increased focus on aggressive prevention strategies, ensuring well-functioning health systems are capable of early diagnosis and comprehensive treatment, and to make cancer services accessible and affordable to all.
“Breast cancer continues to take a profound toll on women’s lives and communities,” said lead author Kayleigh Bhangdia, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington.
“While those in high income countries typically benefit from screening and more timely diagnosis and comprehensive treatment strategies, the mounting burden of breast cancer is shifting to low- and lower middle-income countries, where individuals often face later-stage diagnosis, more limited access to quality care, and higher death rates that are threatening to eclipse progress in women’s health.”
Co-author Roman Topor-Madry from the Interdisciplinary Health Data Centre at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Krakow, Poland, told The National that several countries from the Middle East had reported the greatest increases in cases.
While the study did not examine the reasons for these changes, demographic changes are a likely factor, and the Middle East is undergoing one of the fastest epidemiological and social transitions in the world, he said.
For the Middle East and North Africa region, there were 128,000 cases in total in 2023, including 41,100 deaths.
Egypt registered 21,300 cases, Iraq 15,300, Saudi Arabia 4,030, Turkey 22,000 and the UAE less than 1,000.
“Over the past several decades, many countries in the region have experienced profound changes in lifestyle, metabolic, and reproductive patterns, including increasing obesity and high rates of diabetes and elevated blood glucose,” said Mr Topor-Madry.
“At the same time, women are having children later in life, having fewer children overall, and experiencing longer lifetime exposure to oestrogen due to earlier menarche and later menopause, which are factors that are well known to increase breast cancer risk.”
Improved awareness and diagnostics may also contribute to the rise, he said.
The study found that globally, the number of years of healthy life lost to poor health and early death more than doubled from 11.7 million years in 1990 to 24 million years in 2023. However, although women in low- and lower-middle-countries account for 27 per cent (around 628,000) of new cases globally, they contribute to more than 45 per cent of all the ill-health and early deaths from breast cancer globally.
“Low- and middle-income countries are hit hardest by escalating breast cancer burden as many of these nations grapple with lifestyle and demographic changes alongside health systems that are less equipped than ideal to respond, with shortages of radiotherapy machines, chemotherapy drugs, and pathology labs, and standard treatments that can be quite costly,” said co-author Dr Olayinka Ilesanmi, a physician and epidemiologist from Nigeria working for the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
She said that although survival continues to improve in high income countries “outcomes can still depend on where a woman lives”.
Globally, three times as many new breast cancer cases were diagnosed in women aged 55 or older in 2023 (161 versus 50 new cases for each 100,000 women) compared to women aged 20-54 years. However, rates of new cases have risen 29 per cent in women aged 20-54 years old since 1990, with rates in older women not changing substantially.
