According to figures published Tuesday, July 4 by Public Health France, around 433,000 new cases of cancer are now detected in France each year, slightly more than half of them in men.
Twice as many cases of cancer as 33 years ago in France. Between 1990 and 2023, the number of cancer has doubled in France, according to a study by Public Health France (SPF) published on Tuesday July 4. This increase in the number of cases of cancer is largely explained by the increase in the population and its aging: we know that even if cancers can appear at any age, they are much more frequent from the age of 60 in due to an accumulation (over time) of the aggressions undergone by the cells. In addition, DNA repair mechanisms work a little less well in the elderly.
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The most common cancers in France today are cancers of the prostate, breast, colon-rectum and lung. The progress made in screening means that the majority of them can be detected earlier and earlier and undergo treatment, giving patients a better chance of being cured, with fewer sequelae.
But the figures show that different development trends in men and women are related to behavior: tobacco, alcohol, overweight and sedentary lifestyle are involved in almost half of female cancers, while this impact is now less marked in men. For example, while the incidence of lung cancer decreases slightly in men, it increases by 4% per year in women, due to female smoking.
The impact of lifestyle on the onset of cancer
Cancer is never the result of a single cause. It is a set of factors that interact with each other. But beyond aging and genetic background, against which we can not do much, lifestyle habits still weigh quite heavily.
Thus, 20% of cancers are, for example, linked to tobacco, 8% of cancers are linked to alcohol, 10% to overweight or an unbalanced diet, 3% to the rays of the sun, 4% to certain infections such as papillomavirus. It is estimated that acting on these risk factors, and getting vaccinated against high-risk viruses, would prevent a total of 40% of cancer cases in France.