National cancer prevalence estimation in France

In France, as in several other European countries, prevalence has to be est imated from the modelling of 2 of the 3 basic epidemiological measures of i ncidence, mortality, and survival. Since, in these countries, follow-up of cancer patients is only made in a few registries, we explored the feasibili ty of estimating prevalence in the absence of follow-up data. The method, w hich used only incidence and mortality, was validated on Danish data and ap plied to France, For this latter country, the estimation procedure is based on the recorded mortality data and an estimate of incidence for the entire country. It is applied to selected sites of cancer, which account for 80% of the estimated incidence. In 1992, the prevalence of patients who had suc h a diagnosis amounts to 538,000 women and 424,000 men. The most frequent c ancer sites are head and neck, breast, and large bowel, Most of the cancer sites present an increase in prevalence proportion between 1987 and 1992, T he larger increases concern breast and prostate cancer. Int. J. Cancer 87:3 01-304, 2000. (C) 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.