Berrino F, Gatta G, Chessa E, Valente F, Capocaccia R
Division of Epidemiology, Istituto Nazionale per lo Studio e la Cura dei Tumori, Milan.
Eur J Cancer. 1998 Dec;34(14 Spec No):2139-53. doi: 10.1016/s0959-8049(98)00334-7.
This introduction provides a general overview of the aims, methods and procedures used in the EUROCARE II study and the types of analyses presented in each article of this Special Issue of the European Journal of Cancer. The main aims of the EUROCARE II project are the updating of the survival database of the European Cancer Registries, the study of recent trends in relative survival rates and the interpretation of the survival differences observed both in time and across populations. Once having completed the preliminary stage of data checking, a total of 3,473,659 individual records from patients of all cancer sites, diagnosed between 1978 and 1989 and provided by 45 cancer registries in 17 European countries were accepted to build up the EUROCARE database. The quality of these data, in terms of the accuracy of the diagnosis and the validity of vital status assessment, was checked by indirect indicators, based on cross-validation analysis of consistency of the relevant variables. Statistical analysis was based on age-specific relative survival rates, computed for each cancer sites as the ratio of observed survival to the expected survival of the general population of the same area, gender and age, according to the Hakulinen method. An estimate of the European survival was computed as a weighted mean of the corresponding survival of the different countries, using as weights the expected yearly number of incident cases in each country. For comparison purposes, age-standardised survival was also calculated for Europe and for each country involved in the study.
本引言概述了欧洲癌症研究与治疗组织（EUROCARE）II 期研究中所采用的目标、方法和程序，以及《欧洲癌症杂志》这一特刊每篇文章中呈现的分析类型。EUROCARE II 项目的主要目标是更新欧洲癌症登记处的生存数据库，研究相对生存率的近期趋势，并解读在不同时间和不同人群中观察到的生存差异。在完成数据检查的初步阶段后，来自 17 个欧洲国家 45 个癌症登记处提供的、1978 年至 1989 年间诊断的所有癌症部位患者的总计 3,473,659 条个体记录被纳入以建立 EUROCARE 数据库。这些数据在诊断准确性和生命状态评估有效性方面的质量，通过基于相关变量一致性交叉验证分析的间接指标进行了检查。统计分析基于特定年龄的相对生存率，根据哈库利宁方法，针对每个癌症部位计算为观察到的生存率与同一地区、性别和年龄的一般人群预期生存率的比值。欧洲生存率的估计值是通过将不同国家相应生存率的加权平均值计算得出，权重为每个国家每年预期的发病病例数。为了便于比较，还计算了欧洲以及参与该研究的每个国家的年龄标准化生存率。
