Data on cancer patients diagnosed from year of entry into the SEER Program through 1983 were submitted to the NCI by the 11 participants in December 1984. One new registry, the State of New Jersey submitted data for the first time with coverage retrospective to January 1, 1979. The 10 previous participants also supplied follow-up data through December 31, 1983 for all patients diagnosed 1973-82. Survival rates were characterized by the American Joint Committee on Cancer's stage categories. For many anatomic sites, differences in the survival rates previously noted to be significantly higher for whites than for black patients when considering all stages combined disappeared within individual stages categories. This was due to the generally more favorable stage of disease distribution for white patients. For female breast cancer patients the five-year relative survival rate was 75% for whites versus 63% for blacks. This difference was statistically significant, but was accounted for primarily by those who came to diagnosis with lymph node involvement or direct extension of the tumor to adjacent tissues, i.e. stage III-B. For cancer of the uterine corpus, the anatomic site with the greatest difference in survival between black and white patients, even for stage I disease there was a large, statistically significant difference in five-year relative survival rates, 92% versus 75%. Incidence rates for individual years 1973-81 and for the composite of 1973-77 and 1978-81 were published for each SEER area and each ethnic group represented in the Program. Mortality data for these same time periods were obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics and were published. For 1982, the age-adjusted incidence for all cancer sites combined, both sexes combined was 332.6 per 100,000 population while the age-adjusted mortality was 168.5 per 100,000.
