State Cancer Profiles

To receive a personalized response to your specific question, contact the NCI's Cancer Information Service (CIS) at 1-800-4-CANCER (1-800-422-6237).

Information is also available on the NCI Web site:

• Support and Resources for information about cancer support organizations, finances, insurance, hospice care, and home care.
• Coping with Cancer for information about complications of cancer and its treatment, as well as information on treatment-related nutritional concerns, supportive care clinical trials, and end-of-life issues.

NCI's Cancer Clusters fact sheet and CDC's Unusual Patterns of Cancer describe what constitutes a cancer cluster and the process for reporting clusters.

You can also contact your local Health Department or Cancer Registry for the state where you think the cluster is located. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site provides lists of State and Local Health Departments and State Cancer Registries.

State Cancer Profiles provides cancer statistics primarily for prioritizing cancer control efforts. The focus is on cancer sites for which there are known, preventable risk factors (e.g., smoking and lung cancer) or screening tests for early detection and effective treatment options (e.g., mammography screening for breast cancer). Statistics are also now provided for additional cancer sites that have been frequently requested and for which stable statistics can be provided for states and for more populous counties.

If you are looking for statistics for a cancer site that is not provided, please check the Finding Cancer Statistics page of the Surveillance Research Program of the National Cancer Institute. The statistic may be available in a national report or may be calculated using public use data and tools such as SEER*Stat that empowers a user to define very specific data requests.

Currently, data for the following cancer sites are presented: all invasive cancer sites combined, bladder, breast, brain, cervix, childhood cancers all sites combined, colon & rectum, esophagus, kidney, leukemias, liver & bile duct, lung & bronchus, melanomas of the skin, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, oral cavity & pharynx, ovary, pancreas, prostate, stomach, thyroid, and uterus.

You can contact the local Health Department or Cancer Registry for the state/county incidence data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site provides lists of State and Local Health Departments and State Cancer Registries.

Incidence may not be available for one of the following reasons:

1. The legislation or regulations for a few state cancer registries do not allow the registry to release county-level data even to the CDC.
2. Data for the state or metropolitan population-based central cancer registry did not meet selected criteria for inclusion in the United States Cancer Statistics: Incidence report which is a prerequisite for inclusion in the State Cancer Profiles Web site.
3. Statistics for counties or sub-groups with few cases or deaths are suppressed to ensure confidentiality and stability of rate estimates.

Federal programs include the NCI's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) from the 1971 National Cancer Act and CDC's National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) from the 1992 Cancer Registries Amendment Act that was reauthorized in 1998.

The federal data systems only have data at the county, state, and national level. If you would like data for a different geographic area such as a specific city, town, or zip code, you should check with the State Health Department and/or Cancer Registry of the State (See CDC's lists of State and Local Health Departments and State Cancer Registries.

State cancer registries continue to revise and update their data after they are submitted to the federal funding agency (CDC and/or NCI). Some cancer cases will likely have been reported to state cancer registries after the submission date. In addition, some state health departments customize state population estimates when calculating incidence and death rates. For this reason, incidence (and death) rates and case counts reported directly by the state cancer registry in their reports and/or web site may differ from rates presented on the State Cancer Profiles Web Site.

The Screening and Risk Factors Report - Current Smokers or Screening and Risk Factors Report - Ever Smoked 100 Cigarettes contain data on smoking use. BRFSS Survey Data is the source for this data, which is collected by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with state and territory health departments.

We publish the most recent statistics that we have available.

Sometimes more recent local data can be found through state/county cancer registries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site provides lists of State and Local Health Departments and State Cancer Registries.

More information on reporting delay from the SEER Cancer Statistics Review Technical Notes in the section "Reporting Delay."

1. The CDC Research Data Center is available for SEER and NPCR cancer incidence.
2. A free SEER*Stat account gives users access to SEER Incidence (1973 to present) and US Mortality (1969 to present) data.
3. Exporting data to a CSV allows you to run some of your own analyses.

County changes and data availability issues are as follows:

• Due to data availability issues, the time period used in the calculation of the joinpoint regression model may differ for selected racial groups or counties. For a complete list of these, see Joinpoint Trends - Differences.
• In Alaska, the following two geographic areas are grouped together in the data: Denali Borough (02068) and Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area (02290). In addition, data presented on this website currently uses Kusilvak Census Area to represent Wade Hampton Census Area (02270) that changed its name in 2015 to Kusilvak Census Area, Alaska (02158).
• In Colorado, Broomfield was incorporated into a county (officially November 15, 2001) from portions of Adams, Boulder, Jefferson and Weld. Data prior to 2002 is used in the calculation of statistics for these counties using the old county boundaries. Since five years of data are not available for Broomfield county, there are not any mortality statistics published on this web site for Broomfield County (08014).
• In South Dakota, data presented on this website now uses Oglala Lakota to represent Shannon County (46113) that changed its name in 2015 to Oglala Lakota County (46102).

For a more detailed list of county changes over time, please go to the methods page of the population data from the SEER Web site.

This is a collaboration project between the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We update the website when we get new data available to us. Some data are updated more frequently than others.

Our incidence and mortality statistics are updated annually and usually released around June with our demographic information. The Screening and Risk factor information is usually updated in the fall. For more details on what has been released most recently, please go to our Release Schedule.

Tools:

• SEER*Stat is used for calculation of age-adjusted rates for incidence and mortality.
• Joinpoint is used for the calculation of most trends.
• SAS is used to process the data and to calculate ranks.

The SEER 9 cancer registries consist of Atlanta, Connecticut, Detroit, Hawaii, Iowa, New Mexico, San Francisco-Oakland, Seattle-Puget Sound, and Utah. Data are available for cases diagnosed starting in 1973 for these registries with the exception of Seattle-Puget Sound and Atlanta. The Seattle-Puget Sound and Atlanta registries joined the SEER program in 1974 and 1975, respectively. For more information, visit the SEER Web site.

NPCR is the National Program of Cancer Registries, administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The program helps states improve cancer registries and focuses on data collection and surveillance for cancer control and prevention.

All Cancers refers to all invasive cancers combined. This includes the cancer sites that we list on our Web site such as breast, colon and rectum, melanoma, and prostate, as well as all other invasive cancers. Although we list incidence rates for in situ breast cancer for certain areas, in situ breast cancers are not included in the All Cancer Sites category.

ONS stands for Other Nervous System. We combine brain and other nervous system together as one cancer site grouping - Brain and ONS. This includes two groupings:

• Brain
• Cranial Nerves Other Nervous System

"NOS" stands for Not Otherwise Specified.

Incidence Data - We use the SEER Site Recode ICD-O-3 (1/27/2003) Definition, which can be found at https://seer.cancer.gov/siterecode/icdo3_d01272003/.

Mortality Data - We use a combination of ICD-8, ICD-9, ICD-10. Definitions of the codes can be found at https://seer.cancer.gov/codrecode/1969+_d09172004/.

A confidence interval is a range of values that has a specified probability of containing the rate or trend. The 95% (p-value = .05) and 99% (p-value = .01) confidence intervals are the most common.

Hispanic data include all people who identify themselves as being of Hispanic origin. Hispanic ethnicity is considered independently of race, so Hispanic persons may be of any race.

The citation is dependent on which table or graph you are referencing. There are footnotes at the bottom of each graph or table on the Web site noting the source (or a source link) for the data.

Data is easily exported to a comma-separated value (CSV) file using the "Export Data" link located to the right of most tables, graphs, and maps on the Web site. CSV files can be opened in a spreadsheet program, which will automatically separate the data into columns and rows. For sections of the Web site that do not have an "Export Data" link, use the "Make Table" link instead. Select the data you want to copy from the data table, then copy and paste the data into your spreadsheet program.

Graphs and Maps:
To use a graph or map in your presentation, click on the "Save Graph" button next to the graph. This will enable you to download an image file of the graph or map. The image file is in PNG format, which is compatible with most modern presentation, word processing, or image software. Some graphs or images may not have an option to copy in this way. When this is the case, use alt-PrtScr to copy an image of the current window to the clipboard and then paste into your presentation. Next select the image in your presentation document and right click for format picture to access options to crop unwanted areas, add borders, and resize.

The other option is to use the "Make Table" link to export the data as a CSV file or to copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet program. Once the data is in a spreadsheet, you can use your presentation or graphing software to create a graph or table.

Tables
Use one of the methods described in this question to export or copy table data for use in a spreadsheet program. Once you have the data, it can be formatted to meet your needs. Most presentation software will allow you to import data from a spreadsheet.

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