Did You Know? Video Series: Cancer Statistics,
by the National Cancer Institute.
Did you know cancer statistics guide researchers towards new
ways of preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer?
Statistics is the science of collecting a large amount of
numbers, or data, and using them to tell a story.
At the National Cancer Institute--the Surveillance,
Epidemiology, and End Results, or SEER Program,
uses statistics to tell us what is happening with
cancer in the United States.
Let's take a look at some of the statistics on
a SEER Stat Fact Sheet--
5-year relative survival is the percentage of
patients who have not died from their cancer
5 years or more after being diagnosed.
If the percent surviving 5 years is 66, this means that out of
every 100 people who were diagnosed with this cancer,
66 have not died from their cancer in
the 5 years since diagnosis.
You can also see how many people were diagnosed in
a specific year as the total number of new cases, or as
the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people.
The number of new cases per 100,000 people is called
an incidence rate.
Looking at the number of new cases per 100,000 people allows
researchers to compare cancer rates over different
years, even as the U.S. population changes.
What if you want to know how many people are currently
living with cancer in the U.S.?
For this, we use a statistic called prevalence.
Prevalence is slightly different from incidence because it
measures both new and old cases, rather than
just the new cases.
Prevalence combines both measures of the incidence and
the likelihood of surviving cancer.
This is especially important for planning the amount of health
services that will be needed to care for cancer patients.
The number of people who die from cancer in a year can be
shown as the total number of deaths, or as the number of
deaths due to cancer per 100,000 people.
The number of deaths due to cancer is called
a mortality rate.
Data from new cases and deaths can also be looked at by
age, race or ethnicity,
and male or female.
This helps researchers figure out who might be at higher risk
or who should be screened for a particular type of cancer.
Because surveillance statistics are based on large groups of
people, they cannot be used to predict exactly what will
happen in an individual patient.
However, gathering these data over time can show trends in
new cases, deaths, and survival.
This shows where more research is needed.
You may be wondering where all of the data come from--
Local hospitals and clinics report the
data to cancer registries, which then gather the information and
send it to SEER.
SEER combines the data to calculate cancer statistics
that represent the U.S. population.
SEER has many resources to help you find and
understand cancer statistics.
NCI Map Stories show cancer-related data through
the use of U.S. maps.
To see the maps, visit gis.cancer.gov/mapstory
Printable Stat Fact Sheets summarize the latest
cancer statistics for common cancer types, and
link to more information about
risk factors, treatment, and clinical trials.
The Annual Report to the Nation provides an update on
cancer statistics in the United States.
For more information on statistics and additional
resources, visit seer.cancer.gov