Recent survival trends in the most fatal cancers in the Nordic countries: gains in some but not in all

mean 5-year survival improvements in the four Nordic countries until 2013 were 1% for pancreatic cancer, over 1% for female lung cancer and less than 1% for male lung cancer, and close to 2% for stomach cancer. MethodsWe used the NORDCAN database (data version: 9.5 -06.2025), which is currently available at the IARC website (https://nord- can.iarc.fr/en/database#bloc2),a compilation of data from the Nordic cancer registries [13,14].We included cancers of poor survival, including esophagus, stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and lung; data for hypopharynx and pleura cancers were included as available in the database [4]; for comparison, we included all cancers (including the above ones) without the non-melanoma skin cancer (called 'all cancer').Relative survival data (1-and 5-year) were obtained from the database in two 5-year periods (2014-2018 and 2019-2023).Details of the survival methods are available at the NORDCAN website.A difference in survival was considered significant when the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were non-overlapping.The indicated changes were not significant unless specifically stated.US data were obtained from the National Cancer Institute SEER database for White population, covering the last available period of 2015-2021 at https://seer.cancer.gov/statistics-network/explorer/ application.html