As socioeconomic status and access to health care improve, the disease burden of a population tends to undergo an epidemiological transition: populations appear to transition from contracting primarily communicable diseases to developing primarily non-communicable diseases.1 Concomitant changes in lifestyle, dietary, and environmental exposures and increased access to health care can similarly shift the distribution of non-communicable diseases, such as increases in lifestyle-related cancers.2 Identifying and quantifying these shifts in disease burden is crucial to ensure that resource allocation and health-care use are appropriate as local and global demographics change.
Original Article: [Comment] Cancer's global epidemiological transition and growth