According to a study, a growing pandemic of avoidable cancers will diagnose 184,000 individuals in the UK this year, costing the country more than £78 billion.

According to the report, the cost of cancer cases detected in 2023 due to smoking, drinking, obesity, and sunburn resulted in £40 billion in lost productivity and cost those afflicted £30 billion and the NHS £3.7 billion. Cancer prevention costs families and caregivers £3.4 billion and the social care system £1.3 billion.

Physicians have urgently called for a crackdown on smoking, drinking, and bad eating habits in order to decrease avoidable cancers and their expensive effects.

Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) believe that around 40% of all cancers in the UK and globally are possibly avoidable as they are driven by preventable lifestyle factors such as food, smoking, and sunburn.

According to Michelle Mitchell, CRUK’s chief executive, the report is a "stark reminder of the countless lives that could be saved by preventing cancer and a call to the UK government that health prevention strategies are key to relieving pressures on our NHS and economy."

Mitchell called for "bold political action” to tackle the harm caused by tobacco and bad diet.

"If recent trends continue, smoking could cause around 1m more cancer cases in the UK between now and 2040. And more than 21 million UK adults could be obese, which would increase their risk of over 13 types of cancer," she remarked.

The findings are presented in a Frontier Economics analysis for The Guardian on the social and economic consequences of avoidable malignancies in the UK. Frontier, a premier economics firm, specializes in forecasting the expenses of major diseases utilizing government, official, and medical data. It discovered that the £78 billion expenditure is comparable to 3.5% of GDP.

Read more: New cancer treatment offers hope to patients out of options

According to current trends, the number of preventable cancer diagnoses is expected to climb from 184,000 to 226,000 per year by 2040, owing to demographic shifts. 

The study focused on the four most avoidable cancers: skin cancer, lung cancer, bowel cancer, and breast cancer; it found that 79% of the 54,500 new instances of lung cancer diagnosed in the UK each year are avoidable, with tobacco being responsible for nearly three-quarters of them. Similarly, 87% of the 20,500 melanoma cases may have been averted if the individuals involved had not been exposed to UV light through expenditures.

Furthermore, 54% of bowel cancers are considered avoidable - they are "due to modifiable risk factors," according to the report - because they are connected to a lack of fiber, consumption of processed meat, or being overweight or obese. Furthermore, nearly one-quarter of the 61,500 new instances of breast cancer diagnosed in the UK each year are judged as avoidable because they involve obesity or alcohol consumption.

According to Frontier, 97,500 of the 179,000 instances of those four combined that will be detected this year – 54% of the total – will have been avoidable.

The £30bn cost of avoidable cancer to individuals reflects mainly their "quality-adjusted life years" – lost quality of life – when they are ill (£4.3bn) and because some die early (£25.3bn).

According to a study published this week in the journal BMJ Oncology, the number of under-50s diagnosed with cancer globally increased by 79% between 1990 and 2019, owing likely to inactivity, drinking, and smoking.

The British Medical Association (BMA) asked authorities to take action "to reduce the availability and appeal of products such as alcohol, tobacco, and junk food that contribute to a large number of preventable diseases, including some cancers."

Professor David Strain, the chair of the BMA’s board of science, stated, "A sick population makes for a sick economy. "

Drinking as a class 1 carcinogen

According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies, governments should require alcohol companies to include cancer warning labels on cans and bottles.

According to Dr. Sadie Boniface, the IAS head of research, "Since 1988, alcohol has been classified as a class 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the World Health Organization) alongside tobacco and asbestos. In 2020 alone, almost 17,000 cancers due to alcohol were diagnosed in the UK."

She stated that drinking has been linked to seven different types of cancer, including breast, liver, and mouth cancer.

Hazel Cheeseman, the deputy chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, expressed that the legal age to purchase tobacco should be 21 and called for mass media campaigns to encourage quitting smoking.

Mitchell of CRUK expressed concern that the government was likely to miss its target of making England "smoke-free" by 2030 because smoking rates were not falling as quickly as hoped and that long-promised measures to combat obesity, such as a ban on buy-one-get-one-free deals on junk food, had been delayed.

"Reducing the sizeable number of people with these cancers could be a central element to reducing some NHS costs, and more significantly improving productivity, growth, and the lives of countless people and their families," said Matthew Bell, director of Frontier Economics.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson expressed a commitment to tackling causes of preventable cancers by introducing calorie labeling and announcing "a £40m pilot to give eligible patients living with obesity access to effective obesity drugs" and vowed to "help a million smokers across England quit by giving them a free vaping starter kit. There are record numbers of cancer checks happening in the NHS and our major conditions strategy will set out further plans to tackle the main causes of ill-health."