Geographical clusters and common patterns in cancer mortality of the Federal Republic of Germany.

This paper quantitatively analyzes the maps of the Cancer Atlas of the Federal Republic of Germany with respect to regional clustering in the patterns of rates and relations between the patterns for different localizations. Indices of clustering and association are introduced and compared with those values resulting from computer simulations assuming random distributions. For most localizations, the clusterings could not be considered random, even though they were more or less marked, a finding which, in some cases, is neither evident nor generally known. The clusterings and correlations found offer a wealth of material for generating etiological hypotheses.