Cancer Registration Statistics, England, 2023

This publication reports on newly diagnosed cancers and cancer deaths registered by the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) in England in 2023.

Most official statistics reporting on cancer use cancer groupings that are based only on where the cancer started growing in the body (using the ICD-10 classification). This can be a helpful way to summarise cancers but may sometimes hide the different types of cancer that grow in the same place. These different types of cancer can need different treatments even though they are found in the same part of the body.

To better reflect the variety of cancers that patients are diagnosed and treated with, this publication uses the standard NDRS cancer groupings. These groupings include a wide range of subtypes of cancer that may require different treatments and may have different outcomes.

The different cancer groupings introduced have been consulted upon with patient representatives, charities and clinicians. These cancer groupings will gradually evolve to reflect changes in medical knowledge and clinical practice; some parts of the body have yet to be mapped in detail and these will be added to over time.

There are two levels of cancer grouping used (called “main” and “detailed”) and these are explained further on our Standard cancer group definitions webpage.

Some main cancer groups contain a mixture of cancerous and non-cancerous diagnoses. This is to recognise that, for example, a non-cancerous brain tumour may be fatal to a patient, is often treated in the same way as a cancerous equivalent. These cancer groups including non-cancerous diagnoses may be reported on in future survival publications. 

The detailed level of cancer groupings (using the type of cancer cells as well as their location) allows for greater precision and for some cancers to be presented separately which would not be possible using location alone. The cancers that benefit most from using the type of cancer cell as well as their location are blood cancers, bone sarcoma and soft tissue sarcoma.

The way blood cancers are grouped by the coding system ICD-10 brings together diagnoses that are now treated differently. These differences can be coded using the type of cancer cells using the ICD-O-3 coding system.

Sarcomas are rare cancers that can occur in many parts of the body. Using the ICD-10 coding system, these diagnoses are recorded with other non-sarcoma diagnoses. The treatments suitable for patients diagnosed with sarcomas are often very different to those non-sarcoma diagnoses in the same location. There are 6 bone sarcoma groups and 17 soft tissue sarcoma groups presented in this publication.

Many common cancers benefit from having more precise groupings, including lung cancer. About 1 in 12 lung cancer diagnoses are of small cell lung cancer, with the remaining being non-small cell lung cancer. The typical outcomes for small cell lung cancer are different to those of non-small cell lung cancer, with patients offered different treatments.  The type of cancer cell is needed to identify small cell lung cancer from non-small cell lung cancer.

Some common cancers have a single detailed level of cancer grouping. Examples of this include breast cancer; where the way in which a breast cancer is sensitive to different hormone receptor statuses influences the treatments offered to patients and their likely outcomes.

To allow comparison of England’s incidence counts and rates with mortality data and international figures, we present incidence by ICD-10 3-digit codes (Table 2 of data download) alongside the NDRS groupings (Table 1 of data download).