The completeness of the Swedish Cancer Register – a sample survey for year 1998

The Swedish Cancer Register (SCR) is used extensively for monitoring cancer incidence and survival and for research purposes. Completeness and reliability of cancer registration are thus of great importance for all types of use of the cancer register. The aim of the study was to estimate the overall coverage of malignant cancer cases in 1998 and to reveal possible reasons behind non-reporting.

We selected all malignant cancer cases in the Hospital Discharge Register (HDR) from 1998 and compared these records to those reported to the SCR. There were 43,761 discharges for 42,010 individuals of whom 3,429 individuals were not recorded in the SCR. From these 3 429 records we randomly selected 202 patients for review of their medical records to determine whether they should have been registered on the SCR as incident cases in 1998.