Every day in Kosovo, an average of 10 people receive a diagnosis of cancer. The latest report by the National Institute of Public Health shows that cancer is affecting more and more people, not just at an advanced age.
Kancer is like the flu. We’ve heard that phrase a lot. Official figures show that it is not completely baseless, writes Schneta newspaper.
According to the Malije Disease Report for January 2025, Kosovo reported 3,755 new cancer cases.
This amounts to about 10 diagnosiss a day and an epidemic of 235.6 cases per 100,000 people.
In 2012, 1,588 new cases were reported, meaning that the number is more than doubled in 13 years.
If early diagnosed patients were counted or followed during the year, the health system registered 5,564 people with cancer in 2025.
The growth can also result from the best report. But the report itself acknowledges that not all health institutions report the cases. This means that the actual number is likely to be even higher.
Women make up most of the new cases: 1,927 out of 3,775. breast cancer is first, with 592 cases, or 31% of all cancers in women.
The most disturbing is age. A third of the women with breast cancer (206 out of 592) were under 50 years of age, and the report features cases in the 25-29-year-old group. In general, nearly half of women with cancer (49%) were diagnosed before the age of 60.
The list does not include skin cancer, which is not melanoma (211 cases), which usually heals easily and is often excluded from international comparisons.
In men the cancer comes later but closely associated with tobacco
New cases were reported among men. Unlike women, only 14% of them were under 50, while 57% were over 65. The number of cases more than doubled at 5559 years of age, compared with 5050,54 (from 78 to 179), writes Schneta newspaper.
The difference between genders is huge. Lung cancer is 3 times more common in men (243 vs 72), urinary bladder nearly 6 times (176 vs 31), while the larynx 52 against 4. All three are closely associated with tobacco.
In young men, 20,39 years old, over a third of the cases are gender cancers, mainly testis cancer.
The children are not spared. In 2025 52 children and teenagers were diagnosed until the age of 19, about one week.
What increases the risk
The IKSHPK report only provides numbers, not causes. For most cancers, however, science is familiar with risk factors. Some, such as age and genetics, do not change. Many others depend on how we live.
For Kosovo, two factors have particular weight: smoking, which explains the great difference between men and women in lungs and bladders, and air pollution during the winter, which IARC classifies in the same category of tobacco cancer factors.
Source Layer: Insander