Building a database for survival analysis

The AIRT built a national data base for survival data, collecting follow up information regarding incident cases from 14 cancer registries and 2 childhood cancer registries operating in Italy. In this study, 210,661 cases incident during the period 1990-1994, followed up until 1999, were analysed. The Veneto Cancer Registry did the data quality checks, the conversion in SAS format and developed a SAS procedure to perform the survival analysis. The procedure allows to select the cancer registry, the period and the cancer site to analyse, running the Hakulinens' software for relative survival analysis and exporting the results in Excel sheet to produce a standard layout.