Cancer: data introduction

Studies of cancer detection, treatment and survival rates rely on impactful data. Public Health Scotland (PHS) can track everything from the planning of cancer services to their results. PHS also manage the Scottish Cancer Registration Scheme to collect vital details. Please see the Scottish data page for a comprehensive list of outputs PHS produces using cancer and cancer-related data.

Incidence

New cancer diagnoses (cancer incidence) reflect risk factors for developing cancer, an increase in efforts to detect cancer (such as public awareness and screening programmes) and an increase in the number of people at risk of developing cancer (with an ageing and expanding population). They inform our understanding of cancer prevention and the services needed to diagnose and treat cancer. Information on cancer incidence is presented to show changes over time, differences between groups of people (for example, by age, sex, and socio-economic circumstances) and by geographic area. The rates, or risks, of developing cancer are given along with actual numbers of registrations. See the Scottish data page for further details and to access cancer incidence data for Scotland.

Mortality

A major part of our efforts to lessen the burden of cancer on society is to reduce mortality from the disease. Cancer mortality describes deaths due to cancer. It is a product of both the occurrence (incidence) of cancer and survival from the disease. The potential to prevent cancers occurring and to prevent patients dying from the disease varies for individual cancer sites. When attempting to interpret trends in cancer mortality, it is important to remember that recent patterns of cancer mortality are, for the most part, likely to reflect trends in the prevalence of risk (and protective) factors going back several decades, as well as changes in prognosis associated with advances in therapy and a range of other factors that can affect survival. See the Scottish data page for further details and to access cancer mortality data for Scotland.

Survival

Both overall survival and net survival is calculated. See the Scottish data page for further details and to access cancer survival data for Scotland.

Overall survival

For a defined group of cancer patients, overall survival is an estimate of the probability that the average or 'typical' patient will be alive at a given time-point after diagnosis. It does not take account of cause of death, so it provides for this typical patient a crude overall prognosis from all possible causes of death. Overall survival is typically expressed as a percentage in the range 0-100%.

Net survival

For a defined group of cancer patients, net survival is an estimate of the probability that the average or 'typical' patient will be alive at a given time-point after diagnosis, after controlling for other causes of death (i.e. competing risks of death, which can be estimated from background population mortality rates). Net survival is also expressed as a percentage in the range 0-100%.