One in 20 women worldwide is diagnosed with breast cancer, while it is estimated that 1 in 70 is likely to die of the disease during her life, according to a study published in Nature Medicine.

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death in women.

Every minute, four women are diagnosed with breast cancer around the world and a woman dies.

In 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the World Breast Cancer Initiative (GBCI) to set countries to achieve an average annual reduction in breast cancer mortality by 2.5%.

Researchers have analyzed data on the incidence of breast cancer in women and mortality rates in 185 countries. As they found, in 2022 2.3 million new cases and 670,000 breast cancer deaths were recorded worldwide. However, the distribution of these cases was uneven.

In countries with higher human growth indicators (HDI, a system used to measure the overall quality of life of a country), breast cancer rates are higher. On the contrary, in countries with lower HDI life indicators, women diagnosed with breast cancer had disproportionately higher mortality rates. For example, the risk of diagnosis was higher in France (1 in 9) and North America (1 in 10), while the risk of breast cancer death was higher in Fiji (1 in 24) and Africa (1 in 47) .

The authors also examined breast cancer mortality rates in 46 countries in ten years and found that while mortality rates appear to be reduced in 30 countries, only seven countries achieve its goal of reducing mortality by 2.5% per year : Malta, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Slovenia.

Based on current trends, breast cancer and mortality from the disease are expected to increase by 38% and 68% respectively by 2050, disproportionately affecting countries with lower HDI indices. This corresponds to about 3.2 million new incidents and 1.1 million deaths in 2050.

The authors note that these estimates are limited by the quality and availability of data, especially for countries with lower HDI markers, which may have incomplete cancer recording systems. Future estimates were also limited to a subset of countries due to the different sets of data used.

As they point out, urgent actions are required, especially in countries with lower quality of life, as well as continuous investment and improvements in early diagnosis and treatment, in order to reduce increasing inequalities in survival of breast cancer worldwide.

Link to scientific publication:

https://www.nature.com/articles/S41591-025-03502-3