Cancer Registration Statistics, England 2019

The counts and rates of cancer registration are designated as National Statistics. National Statistics are a subset of Official Statistics, which have been certified by the UK Statistics Authority as compliant with its code of practice for statistics.

This bulletin reports on newly-diagnosed malignant primary neoplasms (cancer tumours) registered in the 2019 calendar year and does not include secondary tumours. Counts and rates are presented for England and the nine Government Office Regions, as well as by sex, age groups from under 1 to 90 years and older, Index of Multiple Deprivation quintile and stage at diagnosis.

For this release, refreshed data for 1995 to 2018 were processed and a time series is included in the data tables.

Care should be taken when making comparisons between the historic and latest available data.

Cancer registrations in England can take up to five years after the end of a given calendar year to reach 100% completeness, due to the continuing accrual of late registrations. Further changes may still occur after five years following later diagnostic testing. However, these late changes are uncommon.

It is also important to note the following about the cancer registrations included in this bulletin:

only malignant neoplasms (cancers as described by the World Health Organisation (WHO) International Classification of Diseases: ICD-10 codes C00 to C97) have been included in this bulletin. Unless stated otherwise, “all cancers” in this bulletin excludes cancer registrations of non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC). In addition, the data tables contain in-situ neoplasms and benign neoplasms for completeness.

Incident cases of cancer are counted for each separate primary tumour; one person may be diagnosed with more than one primary tumour and would then appear twice in the incidence statistics; the progressions or recurrence of previous cancer are not counted as new incidence cases.

This bulletin expands the cross-sectional summary of stage at diagnosis from nine common cancers (bladder, breast, colon and rectal, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, lung, melanoma, pancreas, prostate and uterus) to 18 different cancers.

This bulletin includes cancer incidence by Index of Multiple Deprivation quintile at diagnosis for 3-digit ICD-10 codes.

Feedback on the usefulness of the inclusion of stage at diagnosis and Index of Multiple Deprivation is welcome, please send all comments to [email protected].

ICD-10 revision 5 was introduced in 2013. This bulletin and accompanying data tables codes all cancers according to ICD-10 revision 5 for registrations and deaths between 2013 to 2019. All previous years are coded according to the original ICD-10. Any trends must be interpreted with caution as this could be an artefact of a changing coding system rather than any true changes in incidence or mortality over time (see Impact paper on ICD-10 revision 5 for more detail).

The data tables that accompany this bulletin now also include confidence intervals for all age-specific, non-standardised and age-standardised rates, as a measure of uncertainty.

We have returned to publishing the incidence and mortality sections in one release.