Five-year relative survival rate of gallbladder cancer in the USA, Europe and Japan.

Abstract

In order to compare survival rates in Japan with those in the USA and European countries, we abstracted the 5-year relative survival rate from several data sources. Survival rates of cancer diagnosed in 1995 – 99 in the USA were abstracted from 18 cancer registries in the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) data (1). Survival rates of cancer diagnosed in 1995 – 99 in the UK and Norway were from four cancer registries (Norway, the UK: Northern Ireland, the UK: Scotland and the UK: Wales) in the European Network of Cancer Registries (ENCR) data (2), and the rate of cancer diagnosed in 2000 – 2002 in Japan was reported from six cancer registries (Miyagi, Yamagata, Niigata, Fukui, Osaka, and Nagasaki) in the Monitoring of Cancer Incidence in Japan (MCIJ) project (3). Here, we compared the survival rate of gallbladder and other biliary cancer coded as C23 – C24 (ICD10). Figure 1 shows the 5-year relative survival rate of gallbladder and other biliary cancer by age category for males; Fig. 2 shows these data for females. The 5-year relative survival rate of gallbladder cancer was decreasing with age; however, the age differences were not so large compared with other cancer sites. This is because the rates in those below 55 years old were relatively lower than those of other cancer sites. The rates were between 10 and 30% for males, and between 10 and 20% for females. In Japan, the rates tend to be high in all age categories, and in the USA and European areas, the rates were similar.