A new study has found that cancer is now the top killer in some of the world’s richest countries. According to a study published in The Lancet, heart disease remains the primary cause of death globally — accounting for 40% of all deaths, but cancer is now the number one cause in middle and high income countries like Sweden, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Poland, and Turkey. Researchers analyzed data on diseases and death among over 160,000 adults aged 35 to 70 from 21 countries across five continents from 2005 to 2016. The countries where the participants were from were divided into three sections — low-income, middle-income, and high-income. Low-income countries included: Tanzania, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe. Middle-income countries consisted of Iran, South Africa, Philippines, Colombia, China, Brazil, Malaysia and more. The study found that cancer in high-income countries kill twice as many people as heart disease. In middle- and high-income countries, medicines to treat and prevent heart disease may be behind the decline in the number of cardiovascular disease-related deaths. The same is not true for cancer-related deaths because there have been fewer effective therapies for preventing and treating cancer. Although the U.S. is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, it wasn’t involved in the study.
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