You can use our drawing module to retrieve data from the Belgian Cancer Registry (BCR) yourself.
You can select data by:
• Cancer type (inclusion criteria are available here);
• Sex (Male – Female – Both sexes together);
• Region (Belgium – Flanders – Wallonia – Brussels);
• Incidence year (from 1999 for Flanders and from 2004 for all of Belgium until the most recent year available);
• 5-year age group (for absolute numbers and gross incidence only).
The data are always presented in table and graph form, and both the graph and the underlying figures can be downloaded. Three different views are available:
- Absolute numbers (N): these figures give the number of newly registered cancer diagnoses for a given period, region, sex and/or 5-year age group.
- Gross incidence or Crude Rate (CR): this parameter recalculates the absolute numbers (N) to the same population size (N/100,000). For example, you can obtain age-specific incidence rates that allow you to compare the risk of a cancer diagnosis between different 5-year age groups.
- Age-standardised incidence rates are calculated using the 1960 World Standardised Population (WSR), the European Standardised Population from 1976 (ESR1976) and the revised version from 2013 (ESR2013). Standardisation is necessary to accommodate correctly for differences in population structure (over time or between regions). Since cancer is an age-dependent disease, an important factor in interpreting trends in cancer incidence is the ageing of the population. The greater the proportion of elderly people within the population, the higher the expected number of cancer diagnoses for the same population size. The use of absolute numbers (N) or crude rate (CR) can create a misleading picture of the actual changes in the risk of a cancer diagnosis. Direct standardisation is therefore necessary to correctly estimate the evolution of the risk of cancer diagnosis between regions or over time.
Methodological note:
BCR records data on cancer diagnoses for Flanders from the incidence year 1997 onwards. Data from before 1997 are unreliable because the methodology for registration and processing was completely different then. In the period 1997–1999, methodology improved significantly. This continual improvement resulted in an almost complete registration of cancer for Flanders from the incidence year 1999–2000 and led to BCR making cancer diagnosis figures available for Flanders since 1999.
Cancer diagnoses in Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region only started to be registered later, partly due to the 2003 federal legal obligation to register cancer diagnoses. Full coverage for these regions, and thus for the whole of Belgium, is therefore only available from the 2004 incidence year. Data for Belgium before the period 1999–2003 are not included here because of under-registration at that time.
In addition to the standard cancer registration data that are used to determine incidence etc., annual incidence estimates (N and ESR2013) are also calculated.
Source reference:
Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). (2017) TNM classification of malignant tumours (Edited by Brierley JD, Gospodarowicz MK, Wittekind C)(8th edition).
