More Canadians surviving cancer

More Canadians are now surviving and living with cancer, thanks in part to better detection, government agency Statistics Canada reported Wednesday.

Of everyone alive in Canada on January 1, 2005, 695,000 had been diagnosed with an invasive cancer at some point in the previous 10 years. That is about 2.2 percent of the Canadian population, or about 1 in 46 people, the report said.

Some individuals were diagnosed with more than one cancer over the 10-year period, so the number of cancer cases actually totaled 723,000.

"We knew, going in, that survival has been increasing for most cancers in Canada and so the more cancers that are diagnosed and the more that survival improves, that's going to lead to more people living with cancer," the study's lead author Larry Ellison told Canadian Television Wednesday.

The two most common cancers were breast, prostate, which together accounted for just over half of all cases diagnosed in the previous decade.

One in 111 women had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and 1 in 118 men had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

About one-fifth (20.5 percent) of all cases in the population were breast cancer, and 18.7 percent were prostate cancer.

Colorectal cancer was the third most common cancer, at 12.9 percent, followed by lung cancer, bladder cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and skin melanoma.

Among Canadians aged 20 to 39, the most common cancer was thyroid. The most common cancer in the age groups 40 to 49 and 50 to 59 was breast. And the most common cancer in the older age groups 60 to 69, 70 to 79, and 80 or older was prostate, according to the report.