Each year, nearly 54, 000 Americans are diagnosed with melanoma, and more than 7, 000 die as a result of the disease.
Nearly 21, 000 men a year are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the UK and over 10, 000 die as a result of the disease.
Half a billion get the disease every year and more than a million die of it.
But Dr David Oliver, a consultant in palliative care at a hospice in Kent, told the Five Live programme that the majority of people with motor neurone disease are able to die a peaceful death if they have good palliative care.
Those who quit 10 years before getting a prostate cancer diagnosis were no more likely to die of the disease than men who had never smoked at all.
The vast majority die at a young age, and most are never rescued from the specter of degenerative disease.
Claire Holdcroft is an outreach worker for the Jennifer Trust, which works with families affected by spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) - a neuromuscular disease from which babies can die within the first days of life.
In the UK, 114, 000 people a year die from heart attacks, and 30, 000 of these are from heart disease.
In countries such as Tanzania, where nearly 4, 500 women die annually from the disease, the problem is exacerbated by an acute shortage of medical experts and a lack of quality screening services, especially in rural areas.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that around 443, 000 people a year die because of cigarette use.
They found that, as with other studies, patients with cardiovascular disease who were obese or overweight were less likely to die over the next seven years than people of a normal weight who had the condition.
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