Cancer registry based project on survival and care of cancer patients in Europe
EUROCARE-6 continues the activity of monitoring survival and care of cancer patients across Europe initiated in the previous study rounds. The EUROCARE-6 study considers data on cancer patients diagnosed in Europe to 2012 and followed up for life status ascertainment to the end of 2013 or later.
The EUROCARE-5 round has documented major survival improvements occurring in the first decade of 2000’s, as a result of advances in cancer management, as well as persistent international differences, especially between Western and Eastern European countries.
Monitoring changes in cancer patients outcome at the population level remains a major goal of the project. To address evolving and more specific information needs, survival information should be increasingly provided for clinically relevant cancer entities, e.g. by morphological sub-type and by stage at diagnosis. Expanding the availability of clinical variables, particularly those relating to stage at diagnosis and summary treatment, is a priority of the EUROCARE-6 study. This will help to improve the comparability and interpretability of survival analyses results.
AIMS OF EUROCARE-6
The EUROCARE-6 call for data will update the study database by including data of patients diagnosed to 2012 and followed up to 2013 or later, in order to:
- continue monitoring variations in cancer survival by European country/region, age, time and gender, by including up-to-date data from an increasing number of registries
- extend the use of tumour characteristics that potentially influence treatments and outcome, namely: morphology and sub-site localization, stage at diagnosis
- study both long-term survival and temporal trends in survival by updating information on life status ascertainment for all cancer patients recorded by cancer registries; for validation and interpretation of survival, incidence may also be analyzed
- estimate updated cancer prevalence (complete and by disease duration)
- estimate updated incidence, survival and prevalence of rare cancers
- estimate the proportion of cancer patients who are cured of their disease
- estimate the number and proportion of avoidable deaths
The complete EUROCARE-6 study protocol is available here
