Cancer Registration Statistics, England, 2022

The counts and rates of cancer registration are designated as Accredited Official Statistics. Accredited Official Statistics are a subset of Official Statistics, which have been certified by the UK Statistics Authority as compliant with its code of practice for statistics.

This bulletin reports on registered diagnoses of cancers which were diagnosed in the 2022 calendar year. Counts are presented for England, the 9 former Government office regions (provided to support regional communications activity by the charity sector), the 21 Cancer alliances and 42 Integrated care boards, as well as by gender, age groups from under 1 to 90 years and older, Index of Multiple Deprivation quintile and stage at diagnosis (where a staging system exists). In addition, the data tables contain in-situ tumours and benign tumours for completeness (in Table 3 of the accompanying data release).  

Using the ICD-10 coding system, registerable diagnoses include cancers (C00.0 to C97), in situ tumours (D00.0 to D09.9), selected benign tumours (D32.0 to D33.9, D35.2 to D35.4), and tumours of uncertain or unknown behaviour (D37.0 to D48.9). Using ICD-O-3, some blood cancers are also now registerable, which correspond to the ICD-10 codes for amyloidosis (E85*) and amyloidosis of skin (L99*).

For sub-national estimates, data is provided where a non-standardised (all age) rate can be reliably estimated in at least half the geographies for that combination of main and detailed cancer groups, gender, deprivation or stage. To avoid re-identification through slivers, an additional detailed cancer group will be suppressed as required.

Diagnoses are presented both by ICD-10 codes and by main and detailed cancer groups (see the reported measures section for details) which use information on the type of cancer cells as well as their location in the body.

Care should be taken when making comparisons between the historic and latest available data. 

Cancer registrations in England can take up to 5 years after the end of a given calendar year to reach 100% completeness, due to the continuing accrual of late registrations. Further changes may still occur after 5 years following later diagnostic testing. However, these late changes are uncommon. 

Diagnoses of cancer are registered for each separate cancer; a person may be diagnosed with more than one type of cancer and would then appear more than once in the incidence statistics; the progression or recurrence of previous cancer diagnoses are not counted as new diagnoses. 

Counts

Counts of cancer incidence are presented for diagnoses registered in 2022.

Counts of mortality are presented for deaths from cancer registered in 2022.

Crude rates (age-specific and non-standardised)

The crude rate is the number of events in a specific population during a time period per 100,000 people. An event can either be a tumour diagnosis where the measure would be an incidence rate, or a death from cancer where the measure would be a mortality rate. A crude rate is calculated using the following equation:

(total number of events)/(total population) X 100,000

In this publication and the accompanying data tables, the non-standardised rate refers to the crude rate for all ages combined, whereas the age-specific rate refers to the crude rate for individual age bands.

Age-standardised rate

Age-standardised cancer incidence and mortality rates are presented. An age-standardised rate is a weighted average of the age-specific rates, where the weights uses age-specific proportions of a standardised population European Standard Population 2013 (ESP). Standardising rates with the ESP accounts for the differing age structure of different populations. This means that geographical and time comparisons of the rates can be made. ONS recommends that Accredited Official Statistics outputs use the 2013 ESP aggregated to 90 and over, due to the availability of population estimates of assured quality for this age band.

There are two levels of cancer grouping, a main level of up to 36 cancer groups which cover every registerable diagnosis and a detailed level that allow the reporting by appropriate sub-types of cancer. Table 2 presents these main and detailed cancer groups.

The coding systems used to define each main or detailed cancer group are ICD-10 for the location in the body (sometimes with the definitions of the cancer cell type from ICD-O-2) or ICD-O-3 for both the location in the body and the cancer cell type (where needed).

Table 2: A list of the main and detailed cancer groups used in this publication.

Breast cancer estimates for England are also given according to their hormone receptor status markers as set out in Table 3. The way in which a breast cancer is sensitive to different hormone receptor statuses influences the treatments offered to patients and their likely outcomes. The hormone statuses included in this publication are oestrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Triple negative breast cancer occurs when the status for each of the three hormone receptors are negative – these are included as a separate category in the downloadable data tables.

Table 3: combinations of hormone receptor statuses used with breast cancer in this publication.

^*Known as triple (all) negative breast cancer

More information can be found about hormone receptors ER and PR at https://breastcancernow.org/about-breast-cancer/diagnosis/hormone-receptors-and-breast-cancer/ and HER2 at https://breastcancernow.org/about-breast-cancer/diagnosis/her2/