How Many People Die From Stomach Cancer Every Day

Picture a doctor in Seoul and a doctor in Manchester, each telling a 62-year-old patient they have stomach cancer. The patient in Seoul has no symptoms at all. The tumour was spotted on a routine endoscopy that every Korean adult over 40 is offered every two years, and it is small enough to be removed through the mouth without a single cut. The patient in Manchester has had months of indigestion, has lost weight without trying and has finally been sent for tests. By then the cancer has spread.

Same disease, same age, very different odds. Stomach cancer is one of the world's biggest cancer killers, and it is one where geography, a common bacterium and a nation's screening habits decide a remarkable amount of who lives and who dies.

The headline number

Stomach cancer, also called gastric cancer, killed around 660,000 people worldwide in the most recent global estimate from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), published as GLOBOCAN 2022. About 968,000 people were diagnosed in the same year, making it the fifth most common cancer and the fifth deadliest.

That is roughly 1,800 deaths every day, or more than one every minute. Those deaths are part of the total ticking upward on our live death counter, where cancer of every type accounts for around one death in six.

Time period	Stomach cancer deaths (approx.)
Per minute	1.3
Per hour	75
Per day	1,810
Per week	12,700
Per month	55,000
Per year	660,000

The ratio of deaths to diagnoses is stark: for every three people diagnosed, about two die. Only a handful of cancers, such as pancreatic, liver and oesophageal cancer, have a grimmer ratio.

How it compares with other cancers

Cancer	Deaths per year (approx.)	Deaths per day
Lung	1,820,000	4,990
Bowel (colorectal)	904,000	2,480
Liver	758,000	2,080
Breast	666,000	1,820
Stomach	660,000	1,810
Pancreas	467,000	1,280
Oesophagus	445,000	1,220
Prostate	397,000	1,090

Stomach cancer kills almost exactly as many people as breast cancer each year, yet it gets a fraction of the attention. For the cancers either side of it, see our articles on bowel cancer deaths, lung cancer deaths and pancreatic cancer deaths. Our cancer overview page shows the combined live toll.

A cancer that has been falling for a century

In the 1930s, stomach cancer was the leading cause of cancer death for men in the United States. Today it is well outside the top ten there. Death rates have fallen across most of the world for decades, and researchers usually point to two quiet revolutions: the home refrigerator, which cut reliance on salted, smoked and pickled food, and better hygiene and clean water, which reduced childhood infection with the bacterium behind most cases.

The fall has been so steady that stomach cancer is sometimes thought of as a disease of the past. It is not. Because the world's population is larger and older than ever, the total number of deaths remains enormous, and a 2025 IARC study in Nature Medicine projected around 15.6 million lifetime stomach cancer cases among people born between 2008 and 2017 if nothing changes.

Where people die from it

Stomach cancer is heavily concentrated in East Asia. China alone accounts for around four in ten of the world's stomach cancer deaths.

Country	Approx. deaths per year	Notes
China	260,000	Largest total in the world
Japan	41,000	High incidence but strong survival
United States	10,800	Higher rates in Hispanic and Asian Americans
South Korea	7,500	Highest incidence, best survival
United Kingdom	4,500	Most cases found late

Measured by rate rather than total, the countries with the highest incidence include Mongolia, Japan and South Korea, with high rates also in parts of Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Andean countries of South America, such as Peru and Chile. Our Asia region page shows how cancer fits into the continent's wider mortality picture.

The bacterium behind most cases

The single biggest cause of stomach cancer is a spiral-shaped bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. It lives in the stomach lining, is usually picked up in childhood, and infects around four in ten people on Earth. Most never know they have it. In a minority, decades of low-level inflammation slowly change the stomach lining until cancer develops.

IARC classified H. pylori as a definite cause of cancer in 1994. Researchers estimate that it is responsible for around three quarters of all stomach cancers and close to nine in ten of those in the lower part of the stomach. The good news is that it can usually be cleared with a one to two week course of antibiotics and acid-reducing drugs, and trials have found that clearing it lowers the risk of later stomach cancer by roughly half.

Risk factor	How it raises risk
H. pylori infection	Chronic inflammation of the stomach lining over decades
High-salt and salt-preserved foods	Damages the stomach lining and helps H. pylori do harm
Smoking	Raises risk by around half to double
Heavy drinking	Linked to higher risk, especially at the top of the stomach
Processed meat	Classified by IARC as a cause of cancer
Obesity and acid reflux	Linked to cancers where the stomach meets the oesophagus
Family history	Close relatives with stomach cancer raise risk

Several of these risk factors have their own articles on the site. Salt in particular is a bigger killer than most people realise: read how many people die from eating too much salt. The damage from tobacco and alcohol is covered in our pieces on smoking deaths and alcohol deaths.

Who gets it

Stomach cancer is mainly a disease of later life. Most people are diagnosed after 65, and men are about twice as likely as women to develop it.

Age group	Share of stomach cancer burden
Under 50	Small minority, though a rare aggressive type affects younger women
50 to 69	Diagnoses rise sharply
70 to 84	Peak years for both diagnoses and deaths
85 and over	Many cases, often too frail for major surgery

Our age-group pages show how cancer competes with heart disease and other causes at ages 50 to 69 and ages 70 to 84.

Why survival is so different between countries

Here is the most striking fact about stomach cancer: the countries with the most cases often have the best survival. The CONCORD-3 study, which compared cancer survival across 71 countries, found huge gaps in five-year survival.

Country	Five-year survival (approx.)
South Korea	69%
Japan	60%
United States	33%
United Kingdom	21%

The reason is screening. South Korea offers everyone aged 40 and over an endoscopy or X-ray every two years, and Japan has run population screening for decades. As a result, more than half of stomach cancers in Korea are found at an early stage, when they can often be removed with a minor procedure. In the UK and US, where stomach cancer is too uncommon for mass screening to make sense, most cases are found only after symptoms appear and the cancer has spread.

Japan's long-standing success with stomach cancer is one small part of why its people live so long, a story we tell in Japan's secret to living past 100.

How it is treated

Treatment depends almost entirely on how far the cancer has spread when it is found. That is why the screening gap above matters so much.

Stage at diagnosis	Typical treatment	Outlook
Very early (lining only)	Endoscopic removal through the mouth, no cuts	Most people are cured
Early but deeper	Surgery to remove part or all of the stomach, often with chemotherapy	Good chance of cure
Locally advanced	Chemotherapy before and after surgery	Around a third to a half survive five years
Spread to other organs	Chemotherapy, targeted drugs, immunotherapy, symptom control	Treatment extends life but rarely cures

Living without part or all of a stomach is possible. People who have a gastrectomy learn to eat smaller meals more often and usually need vitamin B12 injections for life, because the stomach normally helps the body absorb it. Newer drugs have also improved the outlook for advanced disease. Immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy is now a standard first treatment for many people with advanced stomach cancer in the UK and US, and drugs targeting a protein called HER2 help the minority of patients whose tumours carry it. These treatments add months rather than years for most people, which is why prevention and early detection remain the real prize.

Symptoms that should not be ignored

Early stomach cancer is easy to miss because its symptoms look like everyday indigestion. See a doctor if any of these last for three weeks or more, especially if you are over 55:

• Indigestion or heartburn that does not go away
• Feeling full very quickly when eating
• Losing weight without trying
• Pain or a lump at the top of the tummy
• Difficulty swallowing
• Feeling or being sick, or vomiting blood
• Black, tarry stools or signs of anaemia, such as constant tiredness

Most of the time these symptoms turn out to be something minor. Getting them checked is how cancers are caught at the stage where the Korean patient in our opening scene was caught.

What can be done

Public health experts increasingly argue that the fastest way to cut stomach cancer deaths is to test for and treat H. pylori in countries with high rates, much as hepatitis treatment is used to prevent liver cancer. Japan already covers H. pylori treatment for people with gastritis, and several Asian countries are piloting population testing. Alongside that, cutting salt, stopping smoking and drinking less all lower risk, and they lower the risk of heart disease and stroke at the same time.

If you would like a sense of how your own lifestyle shapes your long-term odds, our risk calculator takes about a minute. For the wider picture, see how many people die from cancer every day, and for another cancer driven by an infection we know how to prevent, read about cervical cancer deaths. Every February, World Cancer Day brings these numbers back into the headlines.

While you were reading

This article takes about 12 minutes to read. In that time, roughly 15 people around the world died from stomach cancer, more than half of them in East Asia, many of them after months of symptoms that looked like ordinary indigestion. The total keeps rising on our live death counter.

Data sources: International Agency for Research on Cancer, GLOBOCAN 2022 (Global Cancer Observatory); Park et al., Nature Medicine (2025) on projected lifetime gastric cancer burden; Allemani et al., CONCORD-3, The Lancet (2018); IARC Monographs Volume 61 (1994) on Helicobacter pylori; Ford et al., Gut (2020) meta-analysis of H. pylori eradication; American Cancer Society Cancer Facts and Figures; Cancer Research UK; Korea National Cancer Screening Program. Country figures are rounded estimates and may differ slightly from national registry data.

This article is for general information only and is not medical advice. If you have persistent symptoms, speak to your GP or a qualified health professional.