New NIH Report: Cancer Deaths Continue to Decline

April 25, 2025

There’s good news on the cancer front as a new study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows overall deaths among men and women declined from 2001 through 2022, even during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The reduction in cancer deaths overall is largely the result of declines in both incidence and death rates for lung cancer and several other smoking-related cancers, researchers noted, in the NIH 2024 Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer.  

Here are five things to know:

• Gender disparities:  The rate of men with new cancer diagnoses decreased from 2001 to 2013 and then stabilized through 2021. However, women saw an overall increase in cancer diagnoses slightly every year from 2003 through 2021, with the exception of 2020.
• Cancer breakdown:  New diagnoses and deaths from lung cancer have declined in both men and women over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the incidence of cancers associated with obesity has been rising. These include female breast, uterus, colon and rectum, pancreas, kidney, and liver cancers. The report also shows that new diagnoses of breast cancer gradually increased over the study period, but the overall breast cancer death rate decreased. 
• Good news for children and adolescents:  Cancer death rates in children declined steadily over the study period. Those for adolescents and young adults also declined until recently, when the decline slowed and stabilized. 
• Racial outcomes:  From 2017 to 2021 (excluding 2020), cancer incidence was stable among men in each major racial and ethnic population group but increased among women in each major racial and ethnic population group.
• COVID-19 disrupted progress:  The report also included an analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on observed cancer incidence. Cancer incidence declined sharply in 2020, likely due to pandemic-related disruptions in health care, but returned to pre-pandemic levels by 2021. The magnitude of the 2020 decline was similar across states, despite variations in COVID-19 policy restrictions.

The report is available online.