U.S. Releases First State-by-State Report on Cancer Occurrences

The U.S. government released its first state-by-state report on cancer Monday and said it can use the information to find unusual patterns of cancer incidence.

Careful analysis of the data should reveal patterns of disease that may prove important, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the report.

Until now, the United States was one of the few industrialized nations that lacked a national cancer registry. Health experts used statistical analysis and extrapolation to project rates for cancer incidence and death.

“Canada and the U.K. and a lot of countries have national cancer surveillance systems in place. Now the United States, for the first time, has that capability,” CDC cancer expert Hannah Weir said in a telephone interview.

“Now we are actually able to start to identify the geographic variability in incidence rates in the United States ... [and] to be able to ... better coordinate cancer prevention and control activities.”

But Weir and other CDC officials declined to identify any geographic variations in general cancer rates, saying it was too soon to say anything informative about them.

“I would caution against trying to identify clusters of cancers in this report,” she said.

“We don’t have all states’ data in the report [and] when you only have one year’s incidence data it is really hard to know what is going on. One state may have the highest rate this year for one cancer and the next year it may not be high at all.”

Weir did note that the five states with the highest rates of colorectal cancer, the third leading cause of cancer in the United States, were all in the East. New Mexico and Utah, in the West, tended to have the lowest rates. “But we don’t see that with all cancers,” she said.

It would take several years of states showing the same pattern to raise concerns.

“If this gradient persists, then you’d want to do some research to start getting into the question of why these rates would be higher,” she said.

“Are the risk factors higher in the population? For example, we know that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer. Does it surprise us that a tobacco-producing state like Kentucky has a higher rate of lung cancer?”

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease.

Health officials say about a third of all cancer cases are caused by lifestyle factors, such as diet, smoking and a lack of exercise.

The CDC, the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society have collaborated for years to produce annual cancer statistics, but their rates have been based on 14% of the U.S. population.

Weir said the CDC was cheered to find the new statistics, based on 78% of the population, bear out the older findings. For instance, prostate cancer is the leading cause of cancer among men, breast cancer among women, and lung and colon cancer come in second and third, respectively, for both sexes.

The report can be seen on the Internet at www.cdc.gov/cancer/npcr/uscs.