The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program is one of the premier cancer surveillance programs in the world currently composed of population-based cancer registries covering 26% of the total US population. The information collected on each and every cancer patient in SEER coverage areas includes demographics, a description of their cancer, treatment, and patient follow-up including cause of death for deceased patients. Periodic reports on various aspects of the cancer burden on the population including incidence, survival, treatment, and mortality using the SEER database are made available to the general research community and the public, and are routinely cited in the medical literature and the media. In most statistical reports on cancer provided by SEER in the past, information on survival has been net survival. i.e., survival which reflects The likelihood of dying of causes related to a patients cancer in the absence of competing causes of death, and is of limited value to clinicians and patients because it does not reflect a patient?s actual survival experience. An initiative of the SEER Program has been to utilize the high quality patient follow-up data (that SEER has collected since its inception in 1973) for the purpose of creating statistical tools that provide survival information that is more clinically relevant to physicians and individual patients. The approach taken was to develop the SEER Cancer Survival Calculator (SEER CSC) which will include algorithms or nornograms for various cancers that will provide survival statistics that account for competing causes of death including the crude probabilities of dying from cancer and from other causes along with the probability of survival. These probabilities are provided in response to inputting a profile of prognostic variables for a patient. To date. nomograms have been developed for cancers of the prostate and colon/rectum. Work is in progress on nomograms for breast cancer, and now head and neck cancer. One unique aspect of the SEER CSC is the ?health adjusted age? which is derived from Medicare data linked to SEER, and quantifies how much older or younger a person is than their chronological age based on the number and type of comorbidities.
