Cancer Updates 2022 - Malaysia

More than 20,000 new cancer patients, with an average age of over 40 years, are detected in Malaysia every year. There were currently about 100,000 cancer survivors in the country who were living with various types of cancer.

NCSM is planning to implement the 'One District, One Screening' program in all states next year to encourage and facilitate the people in the country to do health screening, especially to detect cancer. It is aimed at detecting cancer at an early stage so that immediate treatment could be carried out, thus preventing cancer cells from spreading and saving lives.

Over the past two years, there were more new cancer patients aged between their late 20s and early 30s. The age of individuals diagnosed with cancer is now younger and the number of children with cancer is also high.

For men, there are 10 types of cancer that often affect them and the highest category recorded is bowel cancer, followed by lung, prostate, lymphoma, nasopharynx, liver, leukemia, stomach, skin and bladder. 

For women, the highest case involved breast cancer, followed by colorectal or bowel, cervix, lung, ovary, corpus uteri, lymphoma, thyroid, leukemia and skin.

However, he said, the number of cervical cancer patients had dropped in recent years, believed to be due to the administration of the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine for school students, especially among teenage girls as young as 13 years old.