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You should be able to see the 'real' increase from death rates, assuming the cause of death is correctly identified as cancer pre or post mortem.

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Cancer death rates are going down [1], which to me means we are probably better at treating cancer but also probably finding it more often even when not life threatening and might have gone on unnoticed in an earlier time.

Also we are getting better at treating other diseases and living longer, leading to being more likely to get cancer since if you live long enough you will almost certainly get some form of it.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...

It's slow progress, but we can dream of a day where getting a cancer diagnosis is not a death sentence, but rather something like HIV. Not really curable, but with the right treatment, you can live a fairly normal life. You die with cancer, but not of cancer.

This is the reason most medical studies look at all cause mortality. Cause of death reporting is prone to all kinds of medical judgement and human error that cause reporting specific causes of death to be problematic.

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