Cancer incidence

National statistics on cancer incidence

Incidence is the number of new cases of a disease within a specified population and in a given time period. It is expressed as an absolute number of cases per year or as a rate per 100,000 persons per year. The incidence rate is a measure of the risk of developing cancer.

This report presents the incidence figures for 35 types of cancer in the last 25 years for all of Switzerland, for the German-speaking part of Switzerland (including Rhaeto-Romanic-speaking cantons) and for the French- and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. The 1976 European standard was used for the standardisation of rates. The most recent data are from 2016.

On 1st of January 2020, the Cancer Registration Act (CRA) came into force, which also regulates extensive measures for data protection. According to Art. 30, Para. 3 and 4 of the Cancer Registration Ordinance (CRO), data must be aggregated before publication. The minimum number of cases for any publication of results is 20 cases. Since at the cantonal level (and to some extent also at the level of the language regions), the minimum case number of 20 is often not reached even after cumulation over 5-year periods, the interactive cancer atlas has not updated in 2020. However, the cancer atlas published on 27.11.2018 can still be accessed (last incidence year: 2015).