Know Your Chances: Interactive Risk Charts to Put Cancer in Context

It's difficult to read a newspaper or magazine, watch television, or surf the Internet without hearing about cancer. Unfortunately, these messages are often missing basic facts needed for people to understand their chance of cancer: the magnitude of the chance and how it compares with the chance of other diseases.

Risk charts present these basic facts by showing the chance of dying from a variety of cancer and other diseases over specific time frames. Because age, sex, race and smoking status are so important in determining your chances, the charts let you account for these factors. While there are other factors not accounted for here that make an important difference in your risk (e.g. family history of many diseases, obesity, excessive alcohol consumption, a variety of occupational exposures, etc.), the numbers from the charts will get you into the right ballpark.