🇬🇧 Cancer Registration in Europe: past, present and future

Abstract

The presentation will give an outline of all aspects of population-based cancer registration, also taking into account legislation for the protection of the privacy of cancer patients. How and why cancer registration was started in Europe? It will be explained how cases can be notified from different sources such as pathology and electronic data from hospital databases and how completeness of at least 95% should be achieved. An overview will be presented which data should be collected from the patient, from the tumour and from the hospitals that are involved in the diagnosis and treatment of the cancer, and how the quality of the data can be measured and maintained. For survival studies a cancer registry should also have access to the population register for the date of death or emigration.

Use of the data from cancer registries is essential. A number of examples will be given of the use of cancer registry data, both from an epidemiological as well as from a clinical perspective.

Finally, a future perspective of cancer registration will be shown: can data collection be done automatically and how can we cope with all the changes in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer in an era where whole genome sequencing might become the standard?