The death rate for people affected by cancer has been decreasing in United States. However, not everyone has benefited equally according to the American Cancer Society (ACS).

ACS has predicted that in 2001 around 1.6 million people will be newly diagnosed with cancers and around 572,000 people (more than 1,500 daily) will die from cancer.

For men, there was a 1.9 percent decline in death rate caused by all cancers from 2001 to 2007 only falling 1.5 per cent for women from 2002 to 2007.

People with the least education had more than twice the chance of getting killed by cancers compared to people who had the most education.

One in five American adults are currently smokers, but the rate is half that for college graduates and more than twice as high for people without high school diplomas.

It is commonly known that higher smoking rate highly is linked to higher risk of lung cancer.

The study looked at what would have happened in 2007 among adults ages 25 to 64 in the absence of socioeconomic and/or racial disparities.

If everyone in the United States experienced the same overall cancer death rates as the most educated non-Hispanic whites, 37 percent (60,370 of 164,190) of the premature cancer deaths could potentially have been avoided, the study stated.

This analysis suggests that eliminating socioeconomic disparities in African Americans could potentially avert twice as many premature cancer deaths as eliminating racial disparities, underscoring the dominant role of poverty in cancer disparities.

Lung cancer was the leading cancer type among many types of cancers which accounted for 26 per cent of all cancer deaths in 2011 for both men and women. However, Lung cancer death rates declined remarkably in women after having continuously surged since the 1930s.

Prostate cancer was the second most common cancer that killed men while breast cancer was second for women.

Third-leading cause of cancer deaths for both men and women were colon cancer. Colorectal cancer, less formally known as bowel cancer, is a cancer characterized by neoplasia in the colon, rectum, or vermiform appendix.

The four major types of cancer accounted for more than half of cancer deaths in United States.

The rates and estimates were published in Cancer Statistics, 2011 and Cancer Facts & Figures 2011.

Breast cancer Medicine Breast cancer Breast cancer