Spotlight on Research
SEER Increases Coverage and Forms Partnerships
Cancer intimately touches the lives of perhaps every American at some point, whether as a patient, a loved one or a caregiver. NCI expanded its Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program in 2001 to better understand the cancer burden across the full spectrum of the U.S. population.
- New coverage in four states - Louisiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, and California (the remaining portions of the state not already included) - increases overall surveillance from 14 to 26 percent of the U.S. population, from about 35 million to over 65 million people.
- These additions increased coverage of several populations that were previously underrepresented, including African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Asian and Pacific Islanders, low-income Whites in rural areas and other areas of high poverty, and regions with high cancer death rates.
Learn more about SEER registries
Several partnership activities with state registries, which capture a wealth of information not directly covered by SEER, have also broadened SEER surveillance. For example:
- NCI, CDC, and the California State Department of Public Health collaborated to plan specialized cancer control strategies geared toward reducing the local cancer burden. They used a survey to collect health data and local health systems and policy measures from diverse ethnic, social, and cultural communities in California. This standardized data can be used in developing local cancer control programs and will allow comparison with national cancer control data, providing insight into the direction of future cancer trends.
- NCI, CDC, and other partners are working to establish guidelines that address the technical difficulties of sharing data between state and Federal registries, such as differences in the types of data each registry collects and how the data is stored. Simpler, standardized rules will enable better comparability among data sets and increase opportunity for collaboration.
- NCI is working with others to develop computer applications that will be able to pool and analyze data from multiple cancer registries and disseminate the findings to the cancer community.
The more we can share surveillance data among state and national agencies and the more data we can amass through broader coverage of the U.S. population, the better picture we will have of the cancer burden in the U.S. and the better equipped we will be to find ways to reduce that burden.
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