Chen Wanqing, Director of the National Cancer Center, led a team to release data on cancer prevalence among Chinese residents for the first time in Cancer Letters, an internationally renowned journal specializing in cancer. The results show that the number of cancer cases diagnosed within 5 years and still alive in China is about 7.49 million (of which 3.68 million are men and 3.81 million are women), and the overall 5-year prevalence rate of cancer is 556 per 100,000 people. Compared with the incidence rate, the 5-year prevalence rate can better reflect the disease burden as a whole. According to the survey, among the cancer patients diagnosed with cancer within five years and still alive in China, female breast cancer patients were the most numerous, amounting to 1.02 million, followed by colorectal cancer, lung cancer, stomach cancer and esophageal cancer, which accounted for 56.1% of the total number of these five common cancers. How many of these 7.49 million cancer patients are men and women? The data show that the incidence rate of cancer among women is lower than that of men, but the 5-year cancer incidence rate among women is, on the contrary, higher than that of men. This may be due to the fact that the 5 most common tumors among male patients are gastric, lung, colorectal, esophageal and liver cancers, which have relatively low 5-year relative survival rates. In contrast, the high incidence of cancer in women are breast cancer, colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, thyroid cancer and lung cancer, among which thyroid cancer and breast cancer have high survival rates. The survey shows that every 100,000 people in China’s cities have 666 people diagnosed with cancer in five years and are still alive, and in the countryside it is 440 people. The number of patients with different types of cancer and the cancer rate in urban and rural areas of China are detailed in the table below. The data show that the 5-year cancer rate in urban areas is significantly higher than that in the countryside, which may be related to the high incidence of cancer in urban areas, good medical conditions and long survival period, and the high mortality rate and low survival rate in rural areas. Although the incidence rate can also reflect the cancer burden, its focus is on new cases. In contrast, cancer as a chronic disease, most patients have a long survival period, so the survival status of cancer patients should also be the focus of attention. According to the introduction, the prevalence rate refers to the proportion of the sum of old and new cases of cancer in the total population within a specific period of time, and the 5-year cancer prevalence rate is the number of cases diagnosed with cancer within 5 years that are still alive as a proportion of the current total population. The data for this study were obtained from 177 tumor registries in China, all of which were patients diagnosed with tumors from 2003 to 2005, and the observation deadline was December 31, 2010. The incidence rate was calculated using a mathematical model with incidence data and survival data. It is hoped that these cancer data will enable the public to pay more attention to and understand cancer, and then recognize cancer and consciously adopt a healthy lifestyle, so as to prevent cancer from me.