Years of life lost due to cancer in the United Kingdom from 1988 to 2017

Abstract

Background: We investigated the application of years of life lost (YLL) in routine cancer statistics using cancer mortality data from 1988 to 2017.

Methods: Cancer mortality data for 17 cancers and all cancers in the UK from 1988 to 2017 were provided by the UK Association of Cancer Registries by sex, 5-year age group, and year. YLL, age-standardised YLL rate (ASYR) and age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) were estimated.

Results: The annual average YLL due to cancer, in the time periods 1988-1992 and 2013-2017, were about 2.2 and 2.3 million years, corresponding to 4510 and 3823 ASYR per 100,000 years, respectively. During 2013-2017, the largest number of YLL occurred in lung, bowel and breast cancer. YLL by age groups for all cancers showed a peak between 60-64 and 75-79. The relative contributions to incidence, mortality, and YLL differ between cancers. For instance, pancreas (in women and men) made up a smaller proportion of incidence (3%) but bigger proportion of mortality (6 and 5%) and YLL (5 and 6%), whereas prostate cancer (26% of incidence) contributed 13% mortality and 9% YLL.

Conclusion: YLL is a useful measure of the impact different cancers have on society and puts a higher weight on cancer deaths in younger individuals.

Fig. 1. Number of all cancer (C00-97) mortality, years of life lost (YLL), age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) and age-standardised YLL rate (ASYR).

Statistically significant reductions were observed for both ASMR and ASYR with annual changes of −0.0493 (95% −0.0524 to −0.0462) and -0.3060 (95% CI −0.0360 to −0.0253) between the six time periods, respectively.

Fig. 2. YLL by age (at death) group from 1988–1992 to 2013–2017.

Graphs for all cancers, breast cancer, cervical cancer, kidney cancer, myeloma, leukaemia are included.

Fig. 3. Average YLL of cancer per death for these causes estimated for six time periods.

The average YLL was computed by dividing the total YLL by the total mortality, e.g., the average YLL from the lung cancer (C33-C34) at year 2013–2017 was computed as the following: 500608.86/35485 = 14.10762 (see Table 1).

Fig. 4. Pie charts of cancer incidence, mortality and years of life lost for females and males for 2013–2017.

Only the seven most common cancers (bowel, breast, lung, melanoma skin cancer, oesophagus, pancreas, prostate) are included, and the remaining cancers are combined to ‘Others excluding C44’.