DevCan - Probability of Developing or Dying of Cancer

Statistical models are used to compute the probability of being diagnosed or dying of cancer from birth or conditional on a certain age. DevCan takes cross-sectional counts of incident cases from the standard areas of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program conducted by the National Cancer Institute, and mortality counts for the same areas from data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, and uses them to calculate incidence and mortality rates using population estimates from census data for these areas. These rates are converted to the probabilities of developing or dying from cancer for a hypothetical population. Please note that when the program refers to cancer or incidence, it is referring only to the cancer site that you requested.

DevCan 6.9.2 is the current version of the software (released April 2025). It supports rate editing, sensitivity analysis, user-defined databases, confidence intervals, and the ability to get risk estimates from any age to any age. All revisions made for the current release of the software are listed in readme.txt. The methods section provides information about the methods used in DevCan including a comparison to methods used in previous versions.

This version of DevCan includes the following databases:

  • SEER 21 incidence database for 2000-2022 (2020 Excluded). This database includes detailed racial and ethnic data.
  • SEER 8 incidence database for 1975-2022 with follow-back to 1975 (2020 Excluded).
  • Total U.S. mortality data for 2000-2023. This database includes detailed racial and ethnic data.
  • Total U.S. mortality data for 1975-2023.
  • SEER 21 incidence database for 2020 only. This is a pandemic database. In contains data only from the year 2020 when incidence rates were lower for some cancers due to pandemic related delays in cancer screening and/or delays in cancer diagnosis. Caution should be used in interpretation of risks derived from this database, because, for example, it extrapolates what the lifetime risk of being diagnosed with a specified cancer would be if someone would live their entire life subject to the rates that occurred in 2020.

2020 incidence data has been excluded from the risks of developing cancer. Refer to the Impact of COVID on SEER Cancer Incidence Data for details.

Getting DevCan Statistics

Statistics related to lifetime risks are available from a variety of sources and there are several tools available for finding or calculating statistics.