Title: Why are cancer rates increasing? - Cancer Research UK - Cancer news
Headings: Why are cancer rates increasing?
Why are cancer rates increasing?
What’s the cancer rate in the UK?
Why cancer rates are rising
Specific cancers, specific reasons
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Cancer survival is increasing too
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Content: So this begs the obvious question: just why is our risk increasing? The simple answer is, as the animation above shows: most of us are living longer. Why cancer rates are rising
By far the biggest risk factor for most cancers is simply getting older. More than three-quarters of all people diagnosed with cancer in the UK are 60 and over. And this is because cancer is a disease of our genes – the bits of DNA code that hold the instructions for all of the microscopic machinery inside our cells. Over time, mistakes accumulate in this code – scientists can now see them stamped in cancer’s DNA. And it’s these mistakes that can kick start a cell’s journey towards becoming cancerous. The longer we live, the more time we have for errors to build up.