nci logo
NIH
U.S. National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute

Cancer Statistics

Types of Cancer Statistics

  • Incidence - the number of newly diagnosed cases during a specific time period
  • Mortality - the number of deaths during a specific time period
  • Prevalence - new and pre-existing cases for people alive on a certain date
  • Survival - the proportion of patients alive at some point subsequent to the diagnosis of their cancer
  • Lifetime Risk - the probability of developing or dying of cancer
  • Statistics by Race/Ethnicity - a measure of the cancer burden in racial/ethnic minorities and medically underserved populations

Available Statistics

The following Web-based systems provide access to statistical tables, graphs, and maps from various data sources.

  • Cancer Stat Fact Sheets are a collection of statistical summaries for a number of common cancer types. They were developed to provide a quick overview of frequently-requested cancer statistics including incidence, mortality, survival, stage, prevalence, and lifetime risk.
  • The SEER Cancer Statistics Review (CSR), 1975-2005 includes tables showing cancer statistics by race, sex, age, and year of diagnosis for the major cancer sites and for all cancers combined. Use the search engine to select statistics for specific cancer sites and racial/ethnic groups. From a list of pages that meet your criteria, you can view individual pages or merge pages into one custom-built PDF.
  • Fast Stats links to tables, charts, and graphs of cancer statistics for all major cancer sites by age, sex, race, time period. The statistics include incidence, mortality, survival and stage, prevalence, and the probability of developing or dying from cancer. A large set of statistics is available in pre-defined formats.
  • Cancer Query Systems provide more flexibility and a larger set of cancer statistics than Fast Stats but require more input from the user. A larger number of cancer sites are available, and you have the ability to customize the format of the output into tables, graphs, and delimited format.
  • State Cancer Profiles is a comprehensive system of dynamic maps and graphs enabling the investigation of cancer trends at the national, state, and county level.
  • Cancer Mortality Maps and Graphs shows geographic patterns and time trends of cancer death rates for the time period 1950-1994 for more than 40 cancers.

Refer to the Publications section for additional published reports and statistical monographs.