Average lifespan shortened due to cancer in selected countries of North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania, 2006 and 2016.

Abstract

We applied a novel measure of average lifespan shortened (ALSS) to examine changes in lifespan among patients who died of cancer over a 10-year period from 2006 to 2016 in 20 selected high-income countries from North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. We retrieved cancer deaths in each country from the World Health Organization mortality database. We calculated ALSS as a ratio of years of life lost to the expected lifespan among patients who died from cancer. Between 2006 and 2016, we observed modest changes in ALSS for overall cancer deaths over the study in many countries. The changes in the ALSS over time due to any cancer ranged between -1.7 and +0.4 percentage points (pps) among men and between -1.9 and +0.6 pps among women. Across countries, overall cancer deaths led to an average loss between 16% and 22% of their lifespan in men, and between 18% and 24% in women. Across cancer sites, patients who died of central nervous system cancers, for instance, lost a large proportion of their lifespan. In this study, we demonstrated the use of ALSS across selected high-income countries, which enables population-level assessment of premature mortality among cancer patients over time.