About the NCI SEER Program
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The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database is the only comprehensive source of population-based information in the United States that includes stage of cancer at the time of diagnosis and patient survival data.
SEER collects its statistics from regional cancer registries located throughout the country. SEER tracks and predicts the national incidence of cancer and cancer mortality using statistics from these registries.
We conducted our comparison to SEER in 2009. At that time, the latest statistics available from the SEER database were on cancer patients diagnosed through 2005. To match the SEER sample, we selected CTCA patients who were diagnosed between 2000 and 2005. We selected patients from the SEER database who were similar to the patients in the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) sample in terms of age, type and stage of cancer at diagnosis, year of diagnosis, gender, and other factors.
Any comparison of patient data from a specific treatment center to the SEER database has certain limitations that are characteristic of all studies of this kind. For a complete technical description of our statistical methods go to CTCA Survival Comparison Statistical Methodology.
