The National Cancer Registry Ireland

ONLINE SURVIVAL STATISTICS (RELATIVE SURVIVAL)

Relative survival is the ratio of the survival observed among a group of patients to that expected among the general population of the same age and sex. For cancer patients, it measures the effect of the excess mortality associated with a cancer diagnosis, providing an indirect alternative to estimation of cause-specific survival. Most commonly, five-year relative survival estimates are presented. For example, if average five-year relative survival for patients with a particular cancer type is 80%, on average 20 out of 100 patients die within five years who would not otherwise have died, based on our knowledge of 'background' mortality rates among populations of the same age and sex.

Click below (webpage or xls/Excel format) for the most recent estimates of five-year relative survival for Irish cancer patients (malignant cancers only based on ICD-O-3 rules), at national or HSE area scale. Figures are shown for the most common cancers, based on the first cancer diagnosed in 185,863 patients during 1994-2007 (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer which is rarely fatal).

Survival estimates for Irish patients were derived by matching of registered cancer cases against death certificates for all deaths in Ireland up the end of 2009 and comparison against life tables showing expected probabilities of survival for the general population. Calculations use the strs command with Hakulinen correction in Stata and estimates have been constrained so that relative survival does not exceed 100% in any follow-up interval. Please interpret survival figures with caution - confidence intervals (a measure of statistical uncertainty) are wide on some estimates, and figures shown may be averages across patients of different age, disease stage or other prognostic factors. Updated October 2011.

*Nearest ICD-10 equivalent but figures here are for malignant cancers as defined in ICD-O-3 thus not exact matches to (older) ICD-10 definitions