JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE - EU SCIENCE - Ireland is the country with the highest cancer incidence in the EU

At the end of July, the 2020 estimates on the burden of cancer in the EU released by the JRC confirmed that female breast cancer is still the most commonly diagnosed cancer, followed by colorectal, prostate and lung cancer. The cancer burden is estimated to have risen to 2.7 million new cases (all types, excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) and 1.3 million deaths in 2020.

date: 10/08/2020

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These estimates reveal that cancer affects men slightly more than women, with 54% of new cases and 56% of deaths. The most common causes of death are from cancers of the lung (20.4% of all cancer deaths), followed by colorectal (12.4%), female breast (7.3%) and pancreatic cancer (7.1%).

Higher incidence rates are estimated in the Nordic countries. Ireland has the higher level among the 27 Countries of the European Union, before Denmark and the Netherlands. At the beginning of August, the European Cancer Information System registered for the current year in Ireland 12,689 new cases of cancer among women, for whom breast cancer is the most common (27% of cases, followed by lung and colorectum), while 14,378 cases are recorded among men, of which 31% are prostate cancer.

The output of the JRC project with the European Network of Cancer Registries consist of cancer incidence and mortality indicators, including specific analyses by cancer site, sex, age group, calendar period, and geographic area. The project, launched in 2015, aims at establishing a single European cancer-registry data repository. A total of 149 population-based cancer registries from 34 European countries responded to the call for data and were included in the ENCR-JRC project.