Breast cancer cases in older women set to quadruple Macmillan Cancer Support said the NHS needed to ensure every older woman with breast cancer got the best possible care. Photograph: Burger/Phanie/Rex Features The number of older women with breast cancer will almost quadruple by 2040, according to new research in the British Journal of Cancer. Currently 340,000 of the 570,000 women of all ages in the UK with the disease are 65 or older. That is set to increase to 1.2 million out of a projected 1.68 million total number of women with the disease by 2040. That represents a rise in the proportion of all breast cancers among older women from 59% now to 73% then. The rate of increase among younger women will be much less steep: cases among those aged 44 or under are expected to almost double, and those among 45- to 64-year-olds will exactly double. The NHS needs to take heed of these figures. It is already struggling to provide adequate care for older breast cancer patients," said Ciaran Devane, chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, which funded the research, which was carried out by academics from King's College London. Britain's ageing population is the main reason for the projected rise. According to other recent research in the same journal, the number of older people with any form of cancer is set to more than treble by 2040, from 1.3m to 4.1m. "The NHS needs to ensure that every older woman with breast cancer gets the best possible care," added Devane. "Too many cancer doctors are making assumptions based on age, which often results in older women receiving inadequate care for their breast cancer," he said.