Introduction

The data on this page attempts to describe an overview of the Arizona cancer burden. The data is presented as age adjusted rates. A rate is a type of ratio in which the denominator also takes into account another dimension, in this case time. For example, the incidence rate is the number of new cancers per year. An age adjusted rate is obtained by applying a standard age distribution to the populations being compared in order to compute hypothetical summary rates indicating how the overall rates would have compared if the populations had had the same age distibution. This method is used when age-specific rates of disease are known for the populations being compared. This is necessary to be able to compare rates of cancer in Arizona to the USA and other states in the union.

All of the visualizations on this page comes from the U.S. Cancer Statistics Public Use Databases for years 1999-2016. See the citation below:

National Program of Cancer Registries and Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results SEER*Stat Database: NPCR and SEER Incidence – U.S. Cancer Statistics 2001–2016 Public Use Research Database, November 2018 submission (2001–2016), United States Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Cancer Institute. Released June 2019, based on the November 2018 submission. Accessed at www.cdc.gov/cancer/uscs/public-use.