Cancer overtakes heart disease among Hispanics

Cancer has overtaken heart disease as the No. 1 killer among Hispanics in the United States, and the rest of the country may be only a few years behind.

The change is not exactly cause for alarm. Death rates for both have been dropping for Hispanics and everyone else. It's just that heart disease deaths have fallen faster, largely because of improved treatment and prevention, including the development of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Overall, cancer will probably replace heart disease as the nation's top cause of death in the next 10 years, said Rebecca Siegel of the American Cancer Society, who led the study on the new findings.

The reason it has already happened among Hispanics is that they are younger on average than non-Hispanic whites and blacks. And cancer tends to kill people earlier in life than heart disease, for decades the nation's top cause of death.

The shift could bring about a change in disease-prevention efforts, government spending priorities and people's attitudes.

"We've been so focused on heart disease mortality for so long. . . . This may change the way people look at their risk," said Robert Anderson, who oversees the branch of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control that monitors death statistics.

The cancer society is publishing the study in the September/October issue of CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Cancer is also the leading cause of death for Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. And it is now the leading killer in 18 states, according to 2009 numbers from the CDC.

In Mexico, which has an older population, diabetes is the biggest killer, with cancer No. 2, according to 2009 statistics from the Pan American Health Organization.