Approved Research

Population-level relevance of risk factors on the burden of cancer in Australia and the UK

Lay summary

Cancer is among the leading causes of disease burden in Australia and the UK. Reducing modifiable exposures that cause cancers is a key to reducing this burden. Estimates of proportion of cancers attributable to their causal exposures, and thus preventable if the exposures were modified, can inform cancer prevention. Estimates of past or current cancers attributable to past exposures are available but estimates of future cancers attributable to current exposures, most helpful in guiding cancer prevention, are lacking. The available estimates may also be biased because they have not accounted for other outcomes, such as death, which share risk factors with cancers and are also impacted by exposure modification. Most estimates for the collective contribution of exposures have assumed that they act independently although risk factors often interact to cause cancer. Prior studies have also not compared the preventable burden between different groups within our communities which could inform targeted prevention.

The aim of this project is to quantify the past, current and future cancers attributable to their causal exposures, in Australia and the UK, and assess whether magnitude of cancers attributable to different exposures differs over time, by country and across population groups.

We will achieve this by applying advanced methods that allow us to estimate the proportion of cancers attributable to exposures, while accounting for the fact that some people may be exposed to more than one risk factor which may interact with one another and may also increase the risk of death, to data from Australian and British cohort studies and health surveys. The cohort data linked with national cancer and death databases allows us to estimate the strength of exposure-cancer and exposure-death associations. Data from the health surveys carried out at different points in time allows us to estimate how common the exposures have been over time. Combining these estimates allows us to rank the determinants of cancers over time, by country and population subgroups, including for less common cancers and cancer subtypes, which would not be possible based on data from either country alone.

We estimate that this project will take three years to complete.

The preventability estimates produced are readily translatable as they allow policymakers in Australia and the UK to assess and compare the impact of different approaches to reduce cancer burden, and to identify the population groups with the highest cancer burden and the most to gain from targeted interventions.