According to the American Cancer Society, a very clear link between levels of education and cancer death-rates can be established over the course of the last 20 years or so.
Among Americans, between the period of 1990 and 2007, approximately 900,000 Americans who would have theoretically been marked for death had old rates stayed in place, survived. This indicates a 22 percent decline for men and a 14 percent decline for women in this regard.
Things like a culture-wide movement to refrain from smoking, improved cancer detection method and a general consciousness as it relates to health are recognized as key factors in this decline. Similarly, increased education and better technology on the medical end are credited as reasons for why doctors are quicker to detect problems, and swifter in their efforts to neutralize them.
That being said, less educated Americans are nearly twice as likely to suffer from cancer as their more educated counterparts.
Here are some of the key totals involved, as per WebMD:
• Closing the education-socioeconomic gap would have prevented about 60,000 premature cancer deaths in 2007 alone in people ages 25-64.
• In 2007, the last year for which mortality figures are available, the cancer death rate among the least educated Americans was 2.6 times higher than the death rate among the most educated.
• The death rate from lung cancer was five times higher among the least educated Americans than the most educated.
