NORDCAN

NORDCAN is a web-based tool for displaying cancer statistics from the Nordic countries.

Last updated: 7/12/2023

Latest news

The latest update of NORDCAN was published 02.10.23. NORDCAN now includes data up to and including 2021. There is also some new functionality, for instance age-specific survival and quality tables for incidence, prevalence and mortality.

About NORDCAN

Data from NORDCAN make it possible to compare cancer statistics from the Nordic countries over long periods of time. It is also possible to explore data for individual countries or regions.

Both absolute figures and rates are included in NORDCAN.

NORDCAN can be found by following this link

Some of the data in NORDCAN go back 70 years. The first entries come from Denmark, which established its National Cancer Registry in 1943. The oldest Norwegian data date back to 1953.

The content of NORDCAN includes information on cancer incidence, survival, mortality and prevalence in the Nordic countries.

The statistics are shown for predefined types of cancer or classifications of types of cancer by country, region, sex, age group and year of diagnosis.

Currently, the secretariat for NORDCAN is located in Norway, at the Norwegian Cancer Registry. The Cancer Registry of Norway took over this responsibility from Denmark in 2019.

The front page of the NORDCAN website. Click on the image to go to the statistics tool

Data flow in NORDCAN

NORDCAN's IT group has developed a set of tools in R and Stata that ensure that figures and analyses are comparable across the Nordic countries.

Each country extracts data according to a given specification and uses the NORDCAN tools to quality assure and convert data, and to count/perform analyses.

The tools ensure that all sensitive data is kept safely within each register, and only anonymous counts and analyses are made available in IARC/NORDCAN.

Privacy at NORDCAN

The NORDCAN database consists only of anonymous figures, rates and analyses.

A Risk and Vulnerability Analysis (RoS) has been carried out for NORDCAN.

The RoS analysis can be found here

NORDCAN and partners in brief

The Nordic cancer registries have cooperated closely since the 1950s and constitute the Association of Nordic Cancer Registries (ANCR).
One of the main objectives of the ANCR is to facilitate comparison of cancer incidence in the Nordic countries.
NORDCAN, was conceived through a collaboration between the ANCR and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) with a pilot version in 2002 and a full version from 2003. A new version of NORDCAN was published in February 2020.
From 2002 to 2018, the day-to-day operation of NORDCAN was handled by a secretariat at the Danish Cancer Society. As of 2019, the secretariat function is organised at the Cancer Registry of Norway.
A NORDCAN group has been established consisting of representatives from the cancer registries in the Nordic countries, including the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and from IARC.
The funding of NORDCAN comes mainly from the Nordic Cancer Union (NCU) and the member organisations ("in kind", i.e. through the use of employees to perform various tasks in NORDCAN)
IARC is the World Health Organization's special organization against cancer