Estimating expected survival probabilities for relative survival analysis - Exploring the impact of including cancer patient mortality in the calculations

Our results show that the bias is sufficiently small to be ignorable for most applications, notably for cancers with high or low mortality and for younger age groups (<60 years). However, the bias in relative survival estimates can be greater than 1 percent unit for older age groups for common cancers and even larger for all sites combined. For example, the bias in 10-year relative survival for men aged 75+ diagnosed with prostate cancer was 2.6 percent units, which we think is of sufficient magnitude to warrant adjustment.