Five-year Relative Survival Rate of Cancer in the USA, Europe and Japan

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 2000–02 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.