American Cancer Society discloses that higher education appears to be a game changer when it comes to cancer, according to foreign media reports on Sunday.
The research indicates that the gap is widening in cancer death rates between college graduates and those who only went to high school.
Cancer death rates for those who didn’t finish high school are almost three times higher than those of college graduates.
The gap was especially wide for lung cancer, but it was also palpably large for breast, colon, and prostate cancer. For lung cancer, the death rate was five times higher among the least educated Americans than the most educated.
Ahmedin Jemal, ACS Vice President of Surveillance Research, said that higher smoking and obesity rates among lower-income Americans combined with less access to medical services mainly expounds the disparity.
Researchers concluded that bridging the education-socioeconomic gap would have prevented about 60,000 premature cancer deaths in 2007 alone in people in the 25-64 age group.