Five-year relative survival rate of pancreas cancer in the USA, Europe and Japan.

In order to compare the survival rate in Japan with those in the USA and European countries, we abstracted the 5-year relative survival rate from several data sources. Survival rates of cancer diagnosed in 1995–99 in the USAwere abstracted from 18 cancer registries in the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) data (1). Survival rates of cancer diagnosed in 1995–99 in the UK and Norway were from four cancer registries (Norway, the UK: Northern Ireland, the UK: Scotland and the UK: Wales) in the European Network of Cancer Registries (ENCR) data (2), and the rate of cancer diagnosed in 2000–02 in Japan was reported from six cancer registries (Miyagi, Yamagata, Niigata, Fukui, Osaka and Nagasaki) in the Monitoring of Cancer Incidence in Japan (MCIJ) project (3). Here, we compared the survival rate of pancreas cancer coded as C25 (ICD10). Figure 1 shows the 5-year relative survival rate of pancreas cancer by age category for males; Fig. 2 shows these data for females. For both males and females, survival rates for pancreas cancer were below 30%. The survival rate showed a steep