Cancer is a major cause of illness in Australia and has a substantial social and economic impact on individuals, families and the community. Cancer data in Australia (CdiA) contains a wide range of cancer statistics. CdiA’s primary objective is making Australian cancer statistics accessible. The range of data included within CdiA continues to expand to meet the extensive cancer data needs. The following pages are dedicated to helping you find out what is in the CdiA, what is new and where to find the data you need.
Additional content - October 2022 release
The October 2022 release of this report adds content to the July 2022 release. The data in the July release remains the most recent data available and has not been changed. The following commentaries represent the additional content released in October 2022:
The Cancer mortality by age group data visualisation and Cancer risk data visualisation have undergone some formatting changes but the data remains unchanged from the July release. The formatting changes incorporate information from Commentary 8b into the data visualisation.
What’s in this report?
Cancer data in Australia (CdiA) provides a wide range of statistics on many cancers and data is upated annually. CdiA also includes some cancer data commentaries. Some of these commentaries are targeted articles focussed on specific cancers while others explain how to use CdiA’s data.
Most of the statistics within CdiA are presented through interactive data visualisations. Data for all visualisations, except cancer rankings, are also available in Excel. The list of cancers reported on are listed on the Using the data - FAQs page. Incidence data after 2018 and mortality data after 2020 are based on projections, all other incidence and mortality data are based on actual data.
As advised within the 2021 release of this report, the Australian Cancer Incidence and Mortality (ACIM) workbooks are no longer being provided. However, the range of statistics that were previously available within ACIM books can still be found within the array of CdiA reports.
New content in CdiA for the July 2022 release
Preliminary investigations for enhancing cancer mortality data quality
In previous years, the CdiA has used the National Mortality Database (NMD) for its cancer mortality reporting. This data continues to be used but has been produced with accompanying mortality data from the Australian Cancer Database (ACD). The ACD mortality data has been provided to assist interpreting the appropriateness of NMD mortality data for selected cancers, noting that the decision of whether to use the ACD or NMD may change depending on the cancer.
More information about mortality data and the complexity and challenges of establishing the underlying cause of death, from which cancer mortality data is derived, is discussed in Cancer data commentary number 8. Cancer mortality data is available in the Cancer mortality by age groups data visualisation and also the Cancer risk data visualisation (the accompanying data is located in Excel format within the Data section of this report).
Between now and the 2023 release of CdiA, more investigations will be done towards enhancing cancer mortality reporting.
2022 cancer incidence projections
The previous release of this report projected 150,782 new cases of cancer in 2021 while the updated projections in this report project 158,530 new cancer cases in 2021. While it is expected that the additional year of new cancer data will change projections to some extent, the majority of the increase is due to a change in the prostate cancer projection method.
CdiA core statistics – data updated July 2022
The following statistics form the core CdiA content and are updated annually.
What do the interactive data visualisations contain?
Describing trends for many different cancers, the Cancer summary data visualisation contains:
- the number of cancer cases diagnosed between 1982 and 2022
- the age-standardised rate of cancer cases diagnosed between 1982 and 2022
- rates of cancer cases by age, between 1982 and 2022
- 5-year relative survival rates for cancer, for 5-year periods from 1989–1993 to 2014–2018
- the number of people alive as at December 31 2017 who have been diagnosed with cancer in the last year (in addition to the number of people in the last 5 years and 36 years)
- Segi and World Health Organisation age-standardised incidence rates between 1982 and 2022
The Cancer incidence rankings data visualisation contains the:
- rankings of the top 20 cancers diagnosed, 1982 to 2022, in total and by age groups
Reporting on many different cancers, the Cancer incidence by age groups data visualisation contains:
- the number of cases diagnosed between 1982 and 2022 by age group
- age-standardised and crude incidence rates between 1982 and 2022
- age-specific incidence rates between 1982 and 2022 by age group
- median and mean age at diagnosis between 1982 and 2018
- age groups available are 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 and 50-year age groups
Reporting on many different cancers, the Cancer mortality by age group data visualisation contains:
- the number of deaths from cancer between 1971 and 2022 by age group
- age-standardised and crude mortality rates between 1971 and 2022
- age-specific mortality rates between 1971and 2022 by age group
- age groups available are 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 and 50-year age groups
- median and mean age at death from cancer between 1971and 2020 are provided in a separate Excel workbook.
Reporting on many different cancers, the Cancer survival data visualisation contains:
- observed cancer survival rates (survival for 1 to 5 years)
- relative cancer survival rates (survival for 1 to 5 years)
- conditional cancer survival rates (that is, the rate of surviving an additional 5 years where a person has already survived 1 to 5 years after diagnosis)
Reporting on many different cancers, the Cancer survival by age data visualisation contains:
- observed cancer survival rates by 20-year age groups (survival for 1 to 5 years)
- relative cancer survival rates by 20-year age groups (survival for 1 to 5 years)
- age-adjusted observed and relative survival rates
Reporting on many different cancers, the Cancer by state and territory data visualisation contains:
- the number of cancer cases diagnosed between 1982 and 2018, by state and territory
- the rate of cancer cases diagnosed between 1982 and 2018, by state and territory
Reporting on many different cancers, the Cancer risk data visualisation contains:
- the risk of being diagnosed with cancer between 1982 and 2022, by age
- the risk of death from cancer between 1971 and 2022, by age
- cancer risk adjusted for competing mortality and cancer risk unadjusted for competing mortality
All interactive data visualisations contain information by sex.
Pivot tables that provide cancer incidence counts by 3 character ICD-10 codes are located in the Data section. Rates by age are available within the raw data but do not appear in the pivot table.
CdiA core statistics part 2, cancer by stage - data updated December 2018
The latest national data are provided on cancer survival, and incidence, by stage of cancer at diagnosis for the 5 most commonly diagnosed cancers (melanoma of the skin, and breast, prostate, lung and colorectal cancers) in 2011. The Cancer incidence and survival by stage data visualisation remains available within this report; information remains unchanged from the previous release of this report because more recent cancer incidence and survival by stage data are not available.
Cancer data available as supplementary tables
Supplementary tables are available containing the data used to inform the above-mentioned statistical reports.