Tobacco-related cancers killing young people

A new study has found that over 70 per cent of people in the age group of 30-69 have fallen prey to cancer in India in 2010

The study published by the medical journal Lancet revealed that in 2010 there were 556,400 cancer deaths across India.

In men, the top three cancer killers were oral, stomach and lung cancer, while in women, they were cervical, stomach and breast cancer.

"Cancer appears earlier (in India) than say in China or the U.S., so it's a disease of the young," said the lead author of the paper, Professor Prahbat Jha at the Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto in Canada.

"The males have been smoking for a very long time, even longer than the Chinese and the patterns of diseases that come from prolonged smoking can occur in a population even at a younger ages," Jha told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The authors, who analysed over 1,22,400 deaths in 6,671 small areas over a period of three years, found that 42 per cent male and 18•3 per cent female died due to tobacco-related cancers in 2010.

According to the study, one in every 22 men or women aged 30 in rural India is likely to die of cancer before 70 years, while the risks are one in 20 for men and one in 24 for women in urban areas.

The study has found that a 30-year-old man in northeast has the highest chance (11•2 per cent) of dying from cancer before 70 years, while the risk was less than three per cent for men in eastern states like Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha