KEY POINTS:
Men are clawing back the difference between themselves and women in New Zealand's cancer mortality rates, a major health report to be released today will show.
The Mortality and Demographic Data 2004 report will be released by the Health Information Service. It shows cancer causes the most deaths but that more than 60 per cent of New Zealanders diagnosed with cancer survive for at least five years.
And men now face increasingly lower risk compared with women.
Although the cancer mortality rate is dropping for both sexes, the report says, lung cancer rates are beginning to drop for men, but not for women. Death from colorectal cancer - also called colon cancer or large bowel cancer - has declined marginally in both sexes, but more so in males.
However, prostate cancer mortality rates show little change, and the female breast cancer mortality rate has declined, but slowly.
Male mortality rates have also fallen more quickly than female rates from ischaemic heart disease - the main form of non-congenital heart disease caused by hardening of the arteries.
The mortality rate has been steadily falling since 1987, but more so for males, who are most at risk, the study says.
Otago University public health professor Tony Blakely said yesterday that males had been slipping further behind females in recent times, and the report was showing a closing of that gap.
He said the mortality rate from heart disease had dropped by two-thirds since 1981. Death among European New Zealanders had dropped the most, although Maori heart disease mortality rates had also dropped by nearly half.
While the incidence of heart disease was dropping, the main changes to the mortality rate had come from improved lifestyles and new, highly successful treatments.
NATION'S HEALTH
* What else does the report show?
* Stroke mortality rates have fallen slowly for both males and females since 1987.
* Access to cholesterol-lowering medications, including statins and fibrates, is now "at least as good in New Zealand as in Australia".
* New Zealand does not compare well with Australia on overall OECD heart disease mortality.
* However, after acute heart attacks, New Zealand has the lowest 30-day in-hospital mortality in the OECD.
* Heart bypass surgery rates are higher in New Zealand than Australia.
* The Government plans to implement a "national health target for cardiovascular disease" in 2008-09.
