Can We Use Survival Data from Cancer Registries to Learn about Disease Recurrence? The Case of Breast Cancer

Background: Population-representative risks of metastatic recurrence are not generally available because cancer registries do not collect data on recurrence. This article presents a novel method that estimates the risk of recurrence using cancer registry disease-specific survival. Methods: The method is based on an illness–death process coupled with a mixture cure model for net cancer survival. The risk of recurrence is inferred from the...