Movember 2024: Testicular Cancer Trends, 1999-2023
Lesser known cancer, but one younger men should look out for
As mentioned several times before, my primary motivation for Movember fundraising is my late husband Stuart, who recently died from advanced prostate cancer.
However, Movember also focuses on testicular cancer, which unlike most cancers has its highest incidence rates in younger men. (Most cancers have increasing incidence with increasing age.)
Movember 2024 Fundraiser
Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:
Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:
Back to the stats…
Testicular Cancer Incidence Statistics
Let’s check out the claim made above, by the Movember Foundation.
I often use CDC WONDER to look up and demonstrate mortality trends, but they also have information on cancer incidence there. Incidence indicates new diagnoses of cancer.
Let’s check out the top 10 sites for cancer among men age 15-39, for the years 2017-2021:
The first “named” site (instead of a large category) is testicular cancer.
The next grouping below is lymphomas, a larger category of testicular cancer, as one can tell from the indentations.
The next “named” cancer would be colorectal cancer, which I’ve written about here:
Increased incidence of cancers at young ages is of concern.
Testicular cancer incidence rate by age group, 1999-2021
In querying the system, which covers 1999-2021 for cancer incidence, let’s look at the top age groups (15-64):
In my Giving Tuesday post, I will look at the same for prostate cancer, and believe me the age structure here with testicular cancer is very different.
Indeed, the highest rates of incidence (which is about when the initial diagnosis is made) occurs at ages 25-34.
Let’s focus at the age groups with the top rates and notice something:
To be sure, I started the vertical axis to emphasize the increase in rates for ages 25-34, but there is no increase for age 35-39.
Yes, there is a lot of noise here, as the rates are relatively low. The rates are per 100,000 men, so for the groups, there are fewer than 2,000 men in each group per year.
For the 25-29 year-old group, there is a cumulative 28% increase over 1999-2021.
Death Rate Trend, 1999-2023
Death rates are even lower than incidence rates, of course. To get numbers that are high enough for the system, I have to use 10-year age groups.
Yes, that’s very busy. So let me take out the two key age groups from this one.
Yeah, that’s not a good trend.
Movember and Testicular Cancer
Unfortunately, testicular cancer got caught up in the controversy with Lance Armstrong (and you can just not look up all that stuff), but the awareness around testicular cancer is not up there with prostate cancer.
Obviously, it’s not as frequent a cancer as the top lifetime diagnosed cancer for men, but it is specifically a cancer that is most often diagnosed among young men. It’s good that Movember is focusing on this cancer.
They have awareness campaigns — how to self-screen (hey, the ladies have been told how-to re: breast cancer, so it’s your turn, guys!) — and a community for men once they’ve been diagnosed: Nuts & Bolts.
Movember has also supported aspects around testicular cancer, such as TIGER trials.
But I think building a community for men who are undergoing these issues with cancer is very important, too.
