Abstract
Background/Purpose Cancer survival provides a means to assess the effectiveness of early detection strategies and the quality of clinical care and management. The SURVMARK2 project provides comprehensive and updated international benchmarking of cancer survival across seven high-income countries, namely Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and the UK, with the aim of increasing our understanding of possible drivers of international differences and informing health policy. Methods Data on primary cancers of the oesophagus, stomach, colon, rectum, liver, pancreas, lung and ovary diagnosed in the period 1995–2014, with follow-up until December 31, 2015, were obtained from population-based cancer registries in 21 jurisdictions in seven countries. Key survival measures, including 1- and 5-year net survival, were calculated by age, sex, period and cancer subtype, using a modelling approach. Results Considerable variation in net survival from cancer continues to exist across the seven included countries during 1995–2014. Survival was consistently higher in Australia, followed by Canada and Norway and lower in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. For colon cancer, 5-year net survival ranged from 69% in Australian women to 55% in women from the UK. Large discrepancies were also found for lung cancer, where 22% of all Canadian women survived 5-years after diagnosis, as opposed to only 10% of UK men diagnosed with this cancer. The poorest survival was observed for pancreatic cancer, with 5-year net survival ranging from 11% in Australia to 5% in the UK. Conclusions/Implications International differences in cancer survival persist, even for poor prognosis cancers. Possible reasons could be related to differences in detection and treatment, but could also be partly due to local registration practices. Unveiling the factors contributing to these differences is crucial to eliminate survival disparities in the future.
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