ReviewCancer incidence and mortality patterns in Europe: Estimates for 40 countries and 25 major cancers in 2018
Introduction
Till date, cancer incidence and mortality data in Europe are a key resource in both planning and assessing the impact of cancer control programmes at the country and regional level. Europe carries a significant load of the global burden, with one-quarter of the estimated cancer cases in 2012 occurring on the continent despite a total population that comprises 9% of the world's population [1], [2].
Through its programmes of collaboration with population-based cancer registries in Europe, members of the European Network of Cancer Registries (ENCR, http://www.encr.eu/) have provided estimates of cancer burden at the European and EU member state level over the last 30 years [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. In this article, a collaboration between the ENCR, their Secretariat housed at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), estimates of cancer incidence and mortality is provided for 25 most common sites in 40 European countries for the year 2018.
The reported estimates are mainly based on the incidence data provided by the European cancer registries for the Cancer Incidence in Five Continents Vol. XI (CI5-XI) project [10], the national mortality data available at the World Health Organisation (WHO) database [11] and the corresponding population estimates from the United Nation (UN) Population Division [2]. The results are also presented for the four European areas as defined in the UN geoscheme (e.g. Eastern, Northern, Southern and Western Europe) [2], Europe and the European Union 28 Member States (EU-28). The complete set of estimates for the 25 cancers, together with an additional breakdown by subsite is available through the European Cancer Information System web application (https://ecis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/).
Section snippets
Populations and cancer sites
Cancer incidence and mortality for the year 2018 by sex and 18 age groups (0–4, 5–9, …, 80–84, 85 and over) were estimated for each of the 39 European countries defined by the United Nations [2] and for Cyprus. Results are presented for the following cancer sites defined according to the 10th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10, version 2010) [12]: lip, oral cavity and pharynx (ICD-10 C00-14), oesophagus (C15), stomach (C16), colorectal (including anus C18-21), liver
Results
Fig. 1 and Table 2 summarise the estimated numbers of new cancer cases and cancer deaths in Europe in 2018 (in thousands), by type of cancer and sex. There were just over 3.9 million new cases of cancer (excluding non-melanoma skin cancers) in Europe in 2018, 53% (2.05 million) occurring in men and 47% (1.85 million) in women. The most common cancer sites were female breast cancer (523,000 cases, 13.4% of all cancer cases), followed by colorectal cancer (500,000, 12.8%), lung cancer (470,000,
Discussion
We estimated 3.91 million new cases (excluding non-melanoma skin cancers) and 1.93 million deaths from cancer in Europe in 2018. In combination, cancers of the female breast, colorectal, prostate and lung represent almost half of the overall burden of cancer in Europe. The same diseases are also major causes of cancer death in Europe in 2018, with pancreatic cancer ranking 4th ahead of prostate cancer. This timely comparative analysis of the cancer burden in Europe also reveals the extent to
Conflict of interest statement
None declared.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledged the following cancer registries who contributed their data to enable the estimates produced in this study via submission to Cancer Incidence in Five Continents Volume XI: Austria: Austrian Cancer Registry; Belarus: Belarussian National Cancer Registry; Belgium: Belgian Cancer Registry; Bosnia and Herzegovina: Republika of Srpska Cancer Registry; Bulgaria: Bulgarian National Cancer Registry; Croatia: Croatian National Cancer Registry; Cyprus: Cyprus Cancer
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