Malignant Standards

Comparisons of incidence statistics for total cancers or categories that include tumors with revised behavior must be made with caution, especially when looking at statistics over time.

On State Cancer Profiles, incidence rate data include cancers classified as malignant based on ICD-O-3, which is the current standard. However, incidence trends are treated differently. For trends, the practice followed by the National Cancer Institute is used, omitting most newly-reportable cancers as well as the tumors that are no longer classified as malignant, for consistency purposes across time by using Behavior Recode for Analysis, not ICD-O-3.

Note: This change was made as of the August 2019 release. Prior to that, the rates and trends were both generated using Behavior Recode for Analysis, not ICD-O-3.