Prostate cancer has become the third most common cause of cancer death in the UK, overtaking breast cancer, despite improvements in survival rates for both.

The top cancer killer in the UK is lung cancer, which claimed 35,486 lives in 2015, followed by colorectal cancer, with a toll of 16,067 people.



However, new figures reveal that 11,819 men died in the UK from prostate cancer in 2015, overtaking breast cancer, which resulted in the deaths of 11,442 women. While not included in the data, about 80 men are also thought to have died from breast cancer in 2015.



Angela Culhane, chief executive of the charity Prostate Cancer UK which collated the figures, said the number of prostate cancer deaths had risen as a result of an ageing population, while improvements in research and screening meant the same effect was not seen for breast cancer.



“We haven’t yet got the big game-changing advances that breast cancer has had in terms of the screening programme and also the precision medicine developments,” said Culhane, adding that breast cancer had received twice as much money for research as prostate cancer. “We need to bust that myth that it is just an old man’s disease that you don’t need to think is significant,” she added.



According to the charity, while 72,513 pieces of research had been published on prostate cancer since 1999, more than 146,000 had been published on breast cancer. Meanwhile, Prostate Cancer UK estimates that £120m is needed for research over the next eight years to halve the number of prostate cancer deaths expected by 2026.



“We want to learn from what they have been able to achieve [for breast cancer] and we can see the correlation between that investment in research and the progress that then follows in terms of reducing the number of deaths,” said Culhane.



But despite the rise in the number of prostate cancer deaths, the bigger picture was positive, said Culhane. “If you compare to 10, 20 years ago, survival rates are generally getting better, that is certainly the case for both prostate and breast [cancer].”

Michael Chapman, director of information and involvement at Cancer Research UK, agreed. “The number of men getting and dying from prostate cancer is increasing mostly because of population growth and because we are living longer,” he said. “If we take into account our growing and ageing population, the death rate for both breast and prostate cancer is falling, though it is falling faster for breast than prostate cancer.”



Roger Wotton, chairman of Tackle Prostate Cancer, said. “This is a wake-up call for men and for the health service. Women have screening for breast cancer and this is one reason why mortality rates for prostate cancer are now higher than those for breast cancer. We need to get the prostate cancer mortality figures down, particularly as one third of men diagnosed already have advanced prostate cancer. We need earlier diagnosis and a better-informed testing regime.”

