ABSTRACT
Cancer is a disease of the elderly: this is true for the majority of cancer types. e average life expectancy of the western population has increased signicantly in the last 40 years and is predicted to rise further such that most babies born in the western world since 2000 will live to see their 100th birthday [1]. In the EU, life expectancy from birth is expected to increase further from 76.7 years in 2010 to 84.6 in males and from 82.5 to 89.1 in females. e population in the US of those older than 65 has been projected by the US censor bureau to be about 90 million by 2050. In the EU, similar projections have been made with the European Commission projecting the percentage of those older than 65 to rise from the present level of 17% to 30% of the EU’s predicted total population of 517 million by 2060 (data from the European Commission). As a consequence of this increase in the age demographic of Western populations, the incidence of most common cancers will increase, as will the need for surgical therapies in these older cancer patients.
