• Posted February 25, 2025

Breast Cancer A Killer In Poor Countries, Report Says

Breast cancer deaths are expected to increase during the next quarter-century, largely impacting the world’s poorest nations, a new international study says.

About 1.1 million breast cancer-related deaths are projected to occur in 2050 worldwide, an increase of 68% from 2022, researchers estimated.

Low-income countries will bear the brunt of this increase, researchers reported in a new study published Feb. 24 in the journal Nature Medicine.

These nations rank low in the Human Development Index (HDI), a metric used to measure a country’s overall quality of life by considering factors like life expectancy, education levels and standard of living.

“While incidence rates were highest in countries with very high HDI scores, lower-HDI countries faced disproportionately greater mortality, reflecting inequities in early detection, timely diagnosis and access to comprehensive breast cancer management,” concluded the research team led by Miranda Fidler-Benaoudia, an adjunct associate professor of medicine at the University of Calgary in Canada.

The results indicate that a World Health Organization (WHO) effort to achieve an average annual reduction in breast cancer deaths of 2.5% hasn’t gained much traction, researchers said. 

Reducing breast cancer deaths and new cases “through primary prevention by intervention on known modifiable risk factors is possible, but only with concerted effort and political will,” researchers wrote. 

“Sustained investment and improvement in early diagnosis and treatment are also urgently needed, particularly in low- and medium-HDI countries, to reduce growing inequities in breast cancer survival and mitigate poor outcomes for the millions of additional women who will receive a diagnosis of breast cancer in the coming years,” they added.

The new report is intended to provide an update on the progress of the WHO effort, called the Global Breast Cancer Initiative, which launched in 2021.

For the study, researchers analyzed an international database called the Global Cancer Observatory that tracks cancer cases and deaths in 185 countries.

The data showed an estimated 2.3 million new cases and 670,000 deaths from breast cancer occurring in 2022.

“Every minute, four females are diagnosed with breast cancer worldwide and one female dies from it,” researchers added. “Breast cancer remains the most frequently diagnosed cancer among females in 2022, and was among the top five contributors to cancer-related deaths.”

Wealthier nations tended to have more new breast cancer cases, researchers found. For example, France (1 in 9 women) and North America (1 in 10) had the highest lifetime risk of breast cancer diagnosis.

These cases are detected earlier due to better screening programs in developed nations, researchers said.

In addition, high-HDI countries also have a “greater prevalence of known risk factors, including having no or fewer pregnancies, older maternal age at first birth, less breastfeeding, older age at menarche, excess body weight, physical inactivity, higher alcohol consumption, hormonal contraception and, historically, hormone replacement therapy for menopause,” researchers wrote.

On the other hand, the lifetime risk of dying from breast cancer is highest in Fiji (1 in 24 women) and Africa (1 in 47).

“Delays in diagnosis and low rates of treatment initiation and completion can be attributed to a variety of systemic, economic and social factors,” researchers wrote.

“For example, the general lack of health coverage in many low- and middle-income countries means that the financial toxicity of direct and indirect out-of-pocket costs of diagnosis and treatment, often in settings where females are not the primary decision-maker for household spending, deters females from seeking diagnosis and prevents them from accessing life-saving treatment during the critical early stage,” the report says.

While breast cancer death rates seem to be decreasing in 30 countries, only seven nations  are meeting the WHO goal of decreasing deaths by 2.5% per year -- Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Slovenia.

An estimated one-quarter of breast cancers could be prevented by decreasing alcohol intake (4%-16%), obesity (8%-28%), physical activity (2%-10%), and hormone medication use (3%), based on data from high-income countries.

Another 4% of breast cancers could be prevented by increasing breastfeeding, researchers added.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more on breast cancer.

SOURCE: Nature, news release, Feb. 24, 2025