How common is bladder cancer?
Bladder cancer is a relatively common form of cancer in the United States.1,2 The National Cancer Institute provides the following statistics about bladder cancer:
- Bladder cancer makes up about 4.6% of all new cancer cases in the United States
- Adults living in the United States have around a 2.4% chance of being diagnosed with bladder cancer during their lives
- There were nearly 700,000 people living with bladder cancer in the United States in 2016
The American Cancer Society approximates around 80,470 new cases of bladder cancer diagnosed in the United States in 2019.
Statistics
Researchers at the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute have found that certain groups of people are more likely to develop bladder cancer than others.1-3
In the United States, the risk of developing bladder cancer increases as you get older:
- Bladder cancer occurs most commonly in people between the ages of 75 and 84 years old
- People are diagnosed with bladder cancer at an average age of 73 years old
- Around 90% of people who have bladder cancer are over the age of 55 years old
In the United States, bladder cancer is more common in men than in women:
- Around 60,500 men will be diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2017
- Around 18,500 women will be diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2017
- A man’s chance of developing bladder cancer is 3 or 4 times higher than a woman’s chance
- For women, the chance of developing bladder cancer is about 1 in 88
- For men, the chance of developing bladder cancer is about 1 in 26
In the United States, bladder cancer is also more common among certain ethnicities than others. Caucasian/White Americans are around twice as likely to be diagnosed with bladder cancer as Black Americans or Hispanic/Latino Americans.
