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Up-to-Date Estimates of Cancer Patient Survival Even with Common Latency in Cancer Registration

¹ Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Aging Research, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; and ² Finnish Cancer Registry, Institute for Statistical and Epidemiological Cancer Research, Helsinki, Finland

Requests for reprints: Hermann Brenner, Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Aging Research, German Cancer Research Center, Bergheimer Strasse 20, D-69115 Heidelberg, Germany. Phone: 49-6221-548140; Fax: 49-6221-548142. E-mail: h.brenner{at}dkfz-heidelberg.de

In an era of ongoing improvement in cancer patient survival, available long-term survival figures from cancer registries are often outdated and too pessimistic for two reasons: first, delay in availability of cancer registry data, typically in the order of a few years, and, second, application of cohort-based methods of survival analysis, which provide survival estimates for patients diagnosed many years ago. We developed a model-based period analysis approach aimed to overcome both problems. We provide extensive empirical evaluation of our approach by comparing its performance with that of previously available methods for monitoring of 5- and 10-year relative survival, with the use of data from the nationwide Finnish Cancer Registry of 490,279 patients ages 15 years and diagnosed with one of 20 common forms of cancer between 1953 and 1997. We show that, in most cases, the model-based approach predicts 5- and 10-year relative survival expectations of newly diagnosed patients quite closely and much better than any of the previously available methods, including standard period analysis. We conclude that the model-based approach may enable deriving up-to-date cancer survival rates even with the common latency in availability of cancer registry data. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2006;15(9):1727–32)

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