Cancer prevalence and survival in Austria – results from the Austrian National Cancer Registry

Nadine Zielonke, Statistics Austria, Social Statistics
Monika Hackl, Statistics Austria, Social Statistics

Every year about 38.000 persons are diagnosed with cancer, half of them getting the diagnose cancer of the large bowel, lung-, breast- or prostate cancer. The aim of the present paper is to illustrate and comment on the results of cancer prevalence and survival analyses for Austria by year of diagnosis, follow-up interval, sex, age and stage at diagnosis. 284 281 persons were alive in Austria at the end of 2009, thereof 149 735 women and 134 546 men. This means that 3.4 out of 100 Austrians alive on the reference day have had a prior cancer diagnosis. Women affected by cancer survive their diagnosis for a considerably longer time span than men. This is mainly caused by breast cancer, which is not only the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women but also characterized by good survival chances. The cancer survival analysis detected several crucial trends, which are widely in line with international findings. In the last 25 years a markedly gain in cancer survival was observed, but we have to consider that all cancers combined represent a broad variety of cancer diseases. The current analysis shows an improvement in 5 year cumulative relative survival from diagnoses in 1985 to diagnoses in 2005 increasing from 44% to 62% (+18 percentage points) for both sexes together, from 38% to 61% in men, and from 49% to 63% in women.