MONDAY, Feb. 2, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- Data are presented for esophageal, melanoma, and prostate cancers in the second annual report from the National Cancer Database (NCDB) published online Jan. 21 in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Elizabeth B. Habermann, Ph.D., M.P.H., from the Mayo Clinic Rochester in Minnesota, and colleagues provided updated data from the NCDB for 2022 and in-depth reports of esophageal, melanoma, and prostate cancer.

The researchers found that the NCDB's five most common adult cancers varied by sex among the 1,331,740 cancers diagnosed in 2022 at 1,250 hospitals. The top five cancers in men were prostate, lung, melanoma, urinary bladder, and colon; in women, they were breast, lung, corpus uteri, colon, and melanoma. In 2022, about half of patients with esophageal cancer presented with stage IV disease. Overall, 70.5 percent of patients did not undergo surgical resection, but esophagectomy was most common for those who did. Poorer overall survival was seen in association with increasing clinical stage group and grade. Melanoma most often presented as stage I (68.1 percent); histology was most commonly superficial-spreading melanoma among invasive melanomas (43.5 percent), with a primary site in the skin of the trunk and upper limb and shoulder (30.3 and 25.1 percent, respectively). Prostate cancer was most often diagnosed as stage II disease. Most men did not receive surgical treatment (61.5 percent), but prostatectomy was the most common surgical procedure among those who did (85.4 percent).

"If patients with esophageal cancer are diagnosed at less advanced stages, we theorize that more patients could be treated with surgery or other less invasive treatment options," Habermann said in a statement.

Several authors disclosed ties to the biopharmaceutical industry.

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