Re: Prevalence of Cancer

Abstract

A recent Stat Bite (1) showed the prevalent cases of eight cancer types in the U.S. population. Practitioners of public health often ignore prevalence as a measure of disease frequency, probably because differences in prevalence between groups can arise from differences in incidence or from differences in the average survival (2). While this ambiguity may cloud etiologic interpretation of differences in prevalence, the mixture of occurrence and survival makes prevalence an important measure of the distribution of disease.