A new study has unveiled an alarming picture of declining overall health in India. The report, released by the Indian multinational healthcare group, Apollo Hospitals, found that skyrocketing cases of cancer and other non-communicable diseases across the country have now made it “the cancer capital of the world.”
Despite reporting more than a million new cases every year, India’s cancer rate has not yet surpassed countries like Denmark, Ireland, and Belgium, which record some of the highest cancer rates in the world. It is also currently lower than the U.S., reporting 100 cases for every 100,000 people compared with 300 in the U.S.
But that could soon change due to what some experts have called an “epidemiological transition.” The new report finds that currently, one in three Indians is pre-diabetic, two in three are pre-hypertensive, and one in 10 struggles with depression. Moreover, chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, and mental health disorders are now so prevalent that they have reached “critical levels,” according to the report.
In particular, the number of cancer cases is expected to rise at a rate that will surpass global averages—from 1.39 million in 2020 to 1.57 million by 2025. Among women, the most common forms of cancer are breast cancer, cervix cancer, and ovarian cancer. Among men, they are lung cancer, mouth cancer, and prostate cancer. While men generally report a 25% higher incidence of cancer than women globally, India bucks this trend with more women getting diagnosed with cancer, according to a study published in the Lancet Oncology. Certain cancers are also affecting younger people sooner than in the U.S., U.K., and China. The median age for lung cancer, for example, is 59 in India, but 70 in the U.S., 68 in China, and 75 in the U.K., according to the new report.
The high incidence of cancer stems from a mix of environmental and socioeconomic factors, like high levels of…
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