Five-year Relative Survival Rate of 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 obtained from three 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 –0 2 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 all cancer sites coded as C00 – 97 (ICD10) in the SEER and ENCR data and as C00 – 96 (ICD10) in the MCIJ data. Figure 1 shows the 5-year relative survival rate of all cancer sites by age category for males; Fig. 2 shows these data for females. The 5-year relative survival rates for females ,65 years old were higher than those for males and the rates for males and females aged � 65 years were in the same range. The reason why survival rates for young females are higher could be that breast and uterus cancers, which have high survival rates, are the main cancer for young females. The survival rates in the USA were the highest in all age – sex categories, except in 15 – 44 years for males. Otherwise, the rates in the UK were relatively lower than those in other countries. Norway and Japan showed similar survival rates in both sexes and all age categories. Basically, the older the age at diagnosis of cancer, the lower the 5-year survival rate; however, only in the USA for males, the rates in those ,75 years old were not changed. The reason why the survival rates for patients � 45 years of age in the USA were at the same level is that patients diagnosed with prostate cancer from PSA screening test had very high survival rates.