A team of cancer experts from the National Cancer Institute has recommended implementing some changes in the way cancer is defined and detected.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. According to the American Cancer Society, 1,660,290 new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in 2013 and approximately 580,350 Americans are projected to die of cancer this year, accounting for almost 1,600 cancer deaths a day.

However, the way cancer is defined and detected has changed over the years. With the advancements in medicine and technologies, many cancers have become curable and fatality rates in others have come down. Hence, a group of National Cancer Institute researchers have recommended implementing certain changes to how physicians define and detect this disease.

Many cancer screening programs detect growths that usually don't progress to a lethal stage and are accompanied by little or no pain. However, the word "cancer" usually evokes the feeling of fear and on hearing the word from their physician many people tend to opt for over treatment of conditions that are often not lethal.

For example, though many doctors have agreed that ductal carcinoma in situ is not cancer, many women are told its breast cancer. Therefore, cancer experts have recommended removing the word carcinoma from the condition's name, reports The New York Times.

"We're still having trouble convincing people that the things that get found as a consequence of mammography and PSA testing and other screening devices are not always malignancies in the classical sense that will kill you," Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the National Cancer Institute, told The New York Times.

Experts also suggest that many lesions detected during breast, prostate, thyroid, lung and other cancer screenings should not be called cancer at all but should instead be reclassified as IDLE conditions, for "indolent lesions of epithelial origin."

"Use of the term 'cancer' should be reserved for describing lesions with a reasonable likelihood of lethal progression if left untreated," USA Today quoted the experts as saying. "Other growths would be classified in a lesser category, 'indolent lesions of epithelial origin' (IDLE)."

The main objective behind recommending these changes is to prevent people from undergoing unnecessary diagnosis and treatments for a condition that is not as serious as cancer.

However, not everyone agrees to these changes. According to Dr. Larry Norton, the medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, doctors are not always in a position to confirm to their patients which growths are progressive and which are not.

"Which cases of DCIS will turn into an aggressive cancer and which ones won't?" he told the Times. "I wish we knew that. We don't have very accurate ways of looking at tissue and looking at tumors under the microscope and knowing with great certainty that it is a slow-growing cancer."

According to a CDC report, the most common types of cancers among men are lung cancer, colorectal cancer and prostate cancer, with lung cancer causing the most number of deaths. Liver cancer is also predominant among Asian/Pacific Islander men.

Among women, the most common types of cancers are breast cancer, lung cancer and colorectal cancer, with lung cancer causing the maximum number of deaths among white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native women.