Lung cancer - UK mortality statistics

Lung cancer has an enormous impact on national mortality and currently accounts for 6% of all deaths and 22% of all deaths from cancer in the UK ( Figure 2.1). One person dies of lung cancer every 15 minutes in the UK 1-3.

Download this chart (42.5KB)

Lung cancer is the most common cause of death from cancer for both men and women, responsible for nearly a quarter (24%) of all male cancer deaths and more than a fifth (21%) of all female cancer deaths. The numbers of deaths from lung cancer and the mortality rates for the constituent countries of the UK are shown in Table 2.1.

Download this table (34.0KB)

Figure 2.2 shows the ages at which people die from lung cancer: more than three-quarters die at age 65 and over, but due to the very large numbers of lung cancer deaths overall, over 4,000 people die from lung cancer before the age of 60.

Download this chart (50.0KB)

The importance of lung cancer as a cause of death has grown throughout most of the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, lung cancer was a rare disease causing fewer than 10 male deaths annually in every 100,000 men.

By the 1950s, the lung cancer death rate had risen six-fold, prompting the first epidemiological study that linked tobacco smoking and lung cancer in Britain 4. By the 1980s, the death rate for lung cancer was over 100 per 100,000 men. From the early 1980s onwards, the male lung cancer mortality rates have fallen continuously.

The striking mortality trends by age over the past fifty years for men and women in England and Wales are shown in Figure 2.3 and Figure 2.41, 19.

Download this chart (52.0KB)

Male lung cancer death rates are higher than female rates in each age group throughout the time period.

Download this chart (42.0KB)

For men, lung cancer mortality rates peaked and then declined steeply for all age groups, beginning first with the youngest men and last for the over 85 year olds in the late 1980s.

For women, the lung cancer mortality rates rose for all age groups for most of the period until the late 1980s when rates began to fall in the 55-64 age group, followed by those of the 65-74 age group in the mid 1990s.

Rates in women aged over 75 years continued to rise during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.

The different patterns of lung cancer death rates in men and women reflect past smoking behaviour: men started to smoke earlier and more heavily than women, but then male smoking cessation has resulted in falling lung cancer mortality rates.

The death ratios by birth cohort illustrate this clearly, with the highest rates for men born around the turn of the century and for women in the 1920s.( Figure 2.5) 6.

Download this chart (41.5KB)

To summarise the more recent trends, the age-standardised lung cancer mortality rates for the countries of the UK between 1982 and 2008 are shown in Figure 2.6 and Figure 2.71-3.

Download this chart (38.5KB)

Scottish lung cancer mortality rates are consistently highest but the trend is the same in all.

Download this chart (36.5KB)

For men, lung cancer mortality rates decreased steadily between 1982 and 2008: in Scotland they fell from 119 to 66 per 100,000 population and in the rest of the UK rates have fallen to around 49-60 per 100,000 population.

Over the same time period, female mortality rates for lung cancer increased until the mid 1990s,  then leveled off until 2004, but since then there is a suggestion that rates may be increasing further. The prediction for Scotland up to 2010-14 is that male deaths from lung cancer will continue to fall while female deaths will increase slightly 7.

Within the UK, variations in lung cancer mortality rates reflect regional smoking patterns. As with incidence, the highest male mortality rates are in Scotland ( Table 2.1).

Within England and Wales there is a north/south differential, with lung cancer mortality rates higher in the north - again a reflection of regional smoking patterns 5.

European lung cancer mortality rates also vary markedly ( Figure 2.8) with age-standardised rates for Hungarian men more than three and a half times higher than those for Swedish men. Countries are at different stages in their lung cancer epidemic as a result of different histories of tobacco consumption and the long latent period between smoking and lung cancer development 8-12.

Download this chart (34.5KB)

Male lung cancer mortality rates in the UK and many other European countries have decreased quite rapidly, together with falls in tobacco consumption. While female lung cancer mortality rates have begun to decline in the UK, especially in younger women, elsewhere in Europe, rates continue to climb and effective anti-smoking policies are urgently needed to control the epidemic of lung cancer in women.15

It may still be possible in some countries, for example Spain and Portugal, to prevent widespread smoking in disadvantaged women whose smoking prevalences are currently low.16 It is estimated that there are around 252,500 lung cancer deaths each year in the European Union (EU-27), around 182,000 in men and 71,000 in women).17 Overall smoking is estimated to cause over half a million deaths each year in the EU and a million in Europe.18   

Worldwide around 1.38 million people died from lung cancer in 2008.

rivationsLung cancer mortality rates have a clear positive association with deprivation, particularly for men.

For men aged 15-64 in England and Wales who died between 1999-2003, the lung cancer mortality rates were 3.7 times higher in the most deprived category compared with the least deprived category, when deprivation was divided into twentieths. 20

Using deprivation quintiles, lung cancer mortality rates for both men and women aged 15-64 in England, were 2.8 times higher in the most deprived compared with the least deprived groups. 20

This association is strongly related to smoking behaviour in different deprivation groups.

When 'country of birth' data is used as an approximation fo ethnic group, lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death for men in all ethnic groups except West African.

However, the proportion of deaths due to lung cancer varies by country of birth, with the highest proportion in Scottish-born men and the lowest in Pakistani-born men.

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death for women born in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but not for other ethnic groups.