From everyone at the Save Your Skin Foundation team, we hope you had a wonderful holiday and new year with your loved ones. The Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) released their 2023 statistics document in November, and to ring in the new year we would like to recap some of their findings. While some of these findings are daunting, we still continue to see decreasing mortality rates for melanoma. This demonstrates that access for Canadians to innovative treatments, including clinical trials, means that fewer Canadians are losing their lives to melanoma.
Please note that the CCS did their last full review of statistics in 2021. This means that the following statistics have not been updated since then, as melanoma was not included in the 2023 updates.
- The rate of melanoma skin cancer diagnoses is still increasing although this is a largely preventable cancer (11)
- Melanoma represented 4.5% of cancers diagnosed in male-identifying people and 3.6% of female-identifying people in 2023 (13)
- Melanoma was the fourth diagnosed cancer in Canadians aged 30-49 years (15)
- The largest age-standardized incidence rate increase since 1984 has been melanoma in males, at a steady rate of 2.2% per year (19)
- Higher incidence rates of incidence and mortality have been observed in coastal provinces, such as British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island (22)
- The lifetime probably of a Canadian developing melanoma is 2.3% (26)
- In 2023, 1.8% of male-identifying Canadians died of melanoma, as did 1.1% of those who were female-identifying (37)
- The mortality rate for melanoma continues to decline in Canada, by -2.6% per year in male-identifying people since 2013 and -3% per year in female-identifying people since 2014 (46, 43)
