Cancer in New Jersey in the 21st Century: Where Do We Stand?
By Jean Anderson Eloy, MD, Suat Kılıç, Sarah S. Kılıç, MA, and Soly Baredes, MD
T
he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 2015, 595,930 people in the United States died from cancer, making it the second leading cause of death.1 Despite considerable progress in primary prevention, the burden of cancer on society remains enormous; more than 1.69 million new cancer diagnoses were projected for 2017, and by 2020, cancer care is expected to cost $157 billion annually. 2 From a population-based perspective, many aspects of cancer, including incidence and survival, would be expected to vary. The United States is a nation with a heterogeneous racial and ethnic makeup that is built on vast territory. Accordingly, the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics and the occupational and environmental exposures of cancer patients
vary by state. Furthermore, the United States does not have a unified healthcare system; healthcare laws, insurance systems and the distribution of expert practitioners can vary among states. The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, which collects information from registries in 18 states/metropolitan areas and covers approximately 28 percent of the national population, is instrumental in the study of regional variations in cancer epidemiology. Numerous SEER studies have shown differences in the incidence and survival of cancers among geographic regions.3–7 In this study, we compared the incidence and survival of cancers between New Jersey (NJ) and the rest of the United
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