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 6.9.0 is the current version of the software (released April 2023). 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 two incidence databases with matching U.S. mortality data, and a U.S. mortality database for calculating probability of dying:

  • SEER 22 incidence database for 2000-2019 (Created from the November 2022 data submission). This database includes detailed racial and ethnic data.
  • SEER 8 incidence database for 1975-2019 with follow-back to 1975 (Created from the November 2022 data submission).
  • Total U.S. mortality data for 2000-2020. This database includes detailed racial and ethnic data.

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

Additional DevCan databases are available as downloadable DevCan databases.

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.

Last Updated: 19 Apr, 2023