rsons in Australia/New Zealand but one in twelve persons in Western Africa would suffer from cancer across their lifespan. This huge variation highlights the unbalanced cancer burden distribution worldwide and indicates the importance of developing country-specific cancer prevention and control plans. The increased lifetime cancer risk with the HDI level indicates that people living in more developed countries/regions have a relatively longer life expectancy and increasing probabilities of developing cancer accordingly ( Figs. S14 and S15 online), while people living in low HDI countries/regions usually have relatively high competing risks of death from other causes than cancer (e.g., acute infectious diseases). The lifetime risk calculated in this study was consistent with some previous national estimations [4] , [10] , such as the total cancer risk estimation in the United States (40.5% among women and 38.9% among men) [11] and the United Kingdom (53.5% among men and 47.5% among women) [8] and the prostate cancer risk in Australia (19.6%) [12] and the breast cancer risk in the Netherlands (13.6%) [13] . This study is the first to provide comparable estimates of the lifetime risk of developing cancer in different geographic areas, considering the increased life expectancy and competing risks of death from any cause other than cancer, unlike the individual country-level estimations. It provides an intuitive indicator that directly helps compare cancer burden across populations and aids in long-term health system planning and cancer control programs. The globally prioritized cancer types and their national variations are instructive for risk factor control and cancer screening program. In general, the lifetime probability of developing major cancers, including lung, colorectum, prostate, and breast cancers, increased alongside the HDI level. Most notably, exceptions were observed in terms of prostate cancer, which presented a 2.3 times higher risk in low HDI countrie