Cancer: New registrations and deaths 2013

Summary

This report is the latest release in the Cancer: New registrations and deaths series, which presents information about new cases of primary cancer diagnosed and reported to the New Zealand Cancer Registry. It also presents information on deaths registered in New Zealand in the same time period where cancer was recorded as the underlying cause of death. The focus of this report is on new cancer cases and deaths in 2013.

This report is accompanied by a set of interactive tables ‘Cancer trends 2013’ that provide supplementary registration and mortality data, including key facts for selected cancers and underlying data used to create graphs and maps in the report.

Overview of key findings, 2013

Cancer registrations

• There were 22,166 new cases of cancer registered in New Zealand.
• More than half of cancers registered were for males (11,491 cases, 52%).
• The age-standardised registration rate was 335.5 cases per 100,000 population.

Ethnic group

• A total of 2220 Māori and 19,946 non-Māori were registered with cancer.
• Māori had a registration rate of 418.9 per 100,000 Māori population, which was 27.6 percent higher than the rate for non-Māori (328.2 per 100,000 non-Māori population).

Most common cancers

• The most commonly registered cancers were prostate (3129 cases), colorectal (3075), breast (3046), melanoma (2366) and lung (2037).
• For males the most commonly registered cancers were prostate (3129 cases), colorectal (1622), melanoma (1226), lung (1032) and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (462).
• For females the most commonly registered cancers were breast (3020 cases), colorectal (1453), melanoma (1140), lung (1005) and uterine (542).

Cancer deaths

• There were 9063 deaths due to cancer in New Zealand.
• More than half of cancer deaths were male (4821 cases, 53.2%).
• The age-standardised mortality rate was 122.8 deaths per 100,000 population.

Ethnic group

• A total of 989 Māori and 8074 non-Māori died from cancer.
• Māori had a cancer mortality rate of 197.9 per 100,000 Māori population, which was 1.7 times the rate for non-Māori (116.0 per 100,000 non-Māori population).

Most common cancer deaths

• The most common cancer deaths were from lung (1656 deaths), colorectal (1252), prostate (647), breast (641) and pancreatic (463) cancer.
• For males the most common cancer deaths were from lung (864 deaths), colorectal (659), prostate (647), melanoma (232) and pancreatic (215) cancer.
• For females the most common cancer deaths were from lung (792 deaths), breast (633), colorectal (593), pancreatic (248) and ovarian (178) cancer.