Cancer Death Rate and Education, Socioeconomic Status Linked in Study

The good news- cancer death rates are down markedly in the US, and have been trending that way for the last two decades.

The bad news for many Americans- that dip has statistically correlated to education. Between 1990 and 2007, according to the American Cancer Society, 900,000 Americans who would have died of cancer had rates stayed the same did not- a 22% decline for men and 14% for women. Improved cancer detection methods and a widespread move away from smoking have been credited with the decline in cancer mortality, but cancer rates among the least affluent Americans is nearly twice that of their more privileged counterparts.

Per WebMD, researchers used education level as a barometer of socioeconomic status and drew the following conclusions:

• Closing the education-socioeconomic gap would have prevented about 60,000 premature cancer deaths in 2007 alone in people ages 25-64.
• In 2007, the last year for which mortality figures are available, the cancer death rate among the least educated Americans was 2.6 times higher than the death rate among the most educated.
• The death rate from lung cancer was five times higher among the least educated Americans than the most educated.

Obesity was a major factor among the lower socioeconomic ranks, but smoking rates factored in heavily as well. While 20% of American adults are smokers, the rate is more than twice that among those without high school diplomas and half that in people who have graduated college. The study found that nearly 40% of cancer deaths in the US in the final year of the study could have been avoided if the cancer death rate remained constant among all socioeconomic classes.