Cancer report summary Answered

Myvizhi Esai Selvan

Hi,

How are incident cancers defined? Should only instance 0 be considered or all instances (0-21) should be taken into account? 
For example, the recent cancer report https://biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/~bbdatan/CancerSummaryReport.html states the number of incident lung cancer as 3814 and number of prevalent lung cancer as 303. However, in the data showcase https://biobank.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/crystal/field.cgi?id=40006 for ‘C34 Malignant neoplasm of bronchus and lung’ the count is listed as 5596.  

 

Comments

1 comment

Date Votes
  • Comment author
    Chris d L The helpers that keep the community running smoothly. UKB Community team Data Analyst
    • Official comment

    Hi Myvizhi,

    The cancer numbers report has a more complete definition of prevalent and incident cancer calculations. This line in particular is relevant here:

    If a participant was diagnosed with cancer in different sites on different dates, only the first one is counted.

    In short, the discrepancy that you've noticed will be because those 1479 participants were diagnosed with a different type of cancer on an earlier date. This earlier cancer will count as either prevalent or incident (depending on whether it was recorded before or after the study began) and will exclude any newer cancer records from being counted as prevalent or incident.

    There is some ambiguous language in the cancer summary report that leads to this confusion, so I will arrange for that to be fixed in a future data refresh along with several other clarity improvements.

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