Cancer is the number two cause of death in the United States, just after heart disease. In 2023, over 1.9 million new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in the US, along with 609,820 deaths (source). Although incidences of cancer have decreased since 2001, cancer still remains a possibility for everyone. As a result, we believe that it is important to look at different factors that may impact cancer diagnoses, such as location, gender, age, and race.

As cancer continues to take a toll on the lives of many, the motivation for this project is to create visualizations to understand past cancer incidence and mortality rate trends (1999-2019).

The data that we would like to show for this project includes cancer trends over location, gender, age, and race in the United States. We would like to visualize these statistics to give further insight on the trends of particular types of cancer in the United States as well as overall cancer incidence and mortality in the mentioned categories (location, gender, age, and race).

Incidence rate is the newly identified cases of a disease or condition per population at risk over a specified timeframe, in our case cancer. The standard for the incidence rates that we calculated in our visualizations are per 100,000 people per year. This can be thought of in our study as “If we watch 100,000 people for one year we would expect [incidence rate], on average, to be newly diagnosed with cancer during a year of observation.”

Incidence Rate = (Number of New Cases of Cancer/Total Population) x 100,000

Mortality rate is the estimated total number of deaths in a population, divided by the total number of people in the population. Disease-specific mortality rates, such as cancer mortality rates in our case, refers to the number of deaths due to cancer divided by the total population. Multiplying the calculation by 100,000 allows us to more easily compare mortality rates across populations of different sizes. Mortality Rate = (Number of Cancer Deaths/Total Population) x 100,000

We hope that this visualization tool will be used as a starting point for researchers, and other stakeholders interested in examining cancer trends over time. Specifically, researchers can utilize this website to explore disparities in cancer incidence and mortality rates based on factors such as location, gender, age, and cancer type.

This tool can serve as a starting point for researchers to conduct further investigations into the reasons behind variations in cancer rates among different locations, age groups, genders, and cancer types.