Long-term cancer survival rates on the rise: AIHW

Data published this week by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) show the chances of surviving cancer more than five years after diagnosis have increased substantially.
 
Its report, Cancer data in Australia, found the ‘five-year relative survival rate’ of people diagnosed with any form of the disease has gone up from 50% during 1987–1991 to 72% in 2017–2021.
 
The AIHW defines the relative survival rate as ‘the percentage of people diagnosed with a cancer who survived for at least five years after diagnosis, relative to people of the same age and sex in the population’. 
 
Between 2000 and 2025, the age-standardised cancer mortality rate also went down from 257 deaths per 100,000 people to around 194 per 100,000, the AIHW reports.  
 
For the most diagnosed cancers – prostate cancer among men and breast cancer among women –five-year survival rates increased from 60% to 96% (prostate cancer) and from 75% to 93% (breast cancer).
 
However, cancer incidence for those in their 30s rose from 121 to around 135 cases per 100,000 people, with the largest rise seen in cases of colorectal cancer.
 
For people aged 40–49, estimated cases rose from 280 to 313 per 100,000 people, a trend most driven by an increase in thyroid cancer diagnoses. 
 
According to the AIHW, around 20,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed for people under the age of 50 each year.
 
Despite the growing diagnosis rates in these age groups, mortality has still decreased in these age groups. It declined from around 60 to 37 deaths per 100,000 people between 2000 and 2025 for people in their 40s, and from 18 to 11 deaths per 100,000 for those in their 30s.  
 
Melanoma of the skin diagnoses have also risen from 54 to around 63 cases per 100,000 people in the past 25 years.  
 
The organisation says almost one million Australians have had a cancer diagnosis in the past 10 years, with around 170,000 new cases this year.
 
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