Rare and less common cancers                                         

Rare and less common cancers make up 54% of all cancer deaths in England, with many of these individual cancer sites covered by these definitions not included in routine publications. Awareness of less common and rarer cancers has been championed by the large number of charities that make up Cancer52, a voluntary organisation representing cancer sites that are less common or rare.  The aims of this new piece of work, led by Cancer52, together with the National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN) are to:

• define coding classifications for rare and less common cancers, agreed with the NCIN Site Specific Clinical Reference Groups, reflecting the breadth of interests of Cancer52 members. Sites may be constructed using ICD-10 codes or morphology codes

• report incidence and mortality figures (numbers and rates), by age and sex, for all cancers in 2010-2013, broken down by rare and less common cancer site at a granular level

The report presents counts and crude rates for 278 cancer sites for incidence figures and 95 sites for mortality figures. These were extracted from the English National Cancer Registration Service database CAS (Cancer Analysis System) and were split by the various site groupings, sex and year of diagnosis. A count of cases, deaths and crude incidence and mortality rates are shown in the following outputs:

Rare and less common cancers: Incidence and Mortality in England, 2010-2013: This report contains lists of less common and rarer cancers sites by ICD-10 and morphology codes, and incidence and mortality figures for England 2010-2013.

Rare and less common cancers: Incidence and Mortality workbook, England, 2010-2013: This workbook contains incidence and mortality figures for England 2010-2013, broken down by sex and by year for less common and rarer cancer sites.