Background. Population of elder Chinese has been increasing, but the pattern and trend of cancer in that population was rarely reported. Methods. Mortality rates for cancer of all sites and of the site specific of the overall and elderly Chinese from 2004 to 2005 were estimated. The age structure of world population was used to observe the changes in the age-standardized mortality rates from 1975 to 2005 using the data from the national death surveys, Disease Surveillance Points, and cancer registries in China. Results. The mortalities among the elderly Chinese were 782.12 per 100,000, substantially higher than those of the people less than 60 years old. The mortalities for cancers of lung, stomach, liver, and esophagus in elderly population showed great increase compared to younger ages. Stomach cancer ranked as the second most common cancer following lung cancer in the elderly, and those two malignancies had similar mortality rates in male elderly, while in female, it ranked as first, surpassed lung cancer. Consistent decreased trends of M/I ratios of cancer were observed in all age groups. Conclusion. Strategies in cancer prevention and cost-effective preventive intervention should be highly considered and strongly implemented among the elderly Chinese. 1. Introduction The recent national population survey showed that the elderly proportion has substantially increased in China in the last decades. In 2011, the number of Chinese in ages of 60 years and older reached at 177 million, up to 13.26% of the residents of mainland China, an increase of 2.93% compared to the same ages in 2000, according to the report of the National Statistics Bureau [1]. The health statistics of the Ministry of Health showed that malignant neoplasm ranked as first cause of deaths among both urban and rural residents of China in that time [2]. Lung cancer was the leading cancer cause of deaths in 2004-2005 resulted from rapid increasing of the mortality in the last thirty years [3–6]. However, there were few reports specifically on the patterns and the trends of cancer among the elderly Chinese, and the analyses were mainly limited for a city and county, or the cases in hospitals [7–9]. It is not clear for the characteristics of cancer in the elderly Chinese at national level. In the current paper, we analyzed the data from national death surveys, disease surveillance, and the cancer registry to describe the epidemiological characteristics and estimate the trends of cancer mortality in elderly Chinese. 2. Material and Methods 2.1. Definitions and Data Data used for analysis in
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