Background: Sarcomas constitute a rare group of malignant tumors which can originate from any organ, tissue, bone or cartilage. Due to their heterogeneity, estimates of sarcoma incidence, prevalence and survival are rare. We estimated the burden of sarcoma in Germany from a large unselected cohort of patients from routine healthcare.
Methods: We utilized the AOK PLUS health services research database covering complete medical information on 2,615,865 individuals from the German federal state of Saxony from 2005 to 2012. Persons were defined as sarcoma cases if they had ≥4 medical accounts with respective ICD-10 code C49 (soft-tissue sarcoma) or C40/C41 (bone sarcoma). We assessed sarcoma burden by calculating five-year prevalences, cumulative incidences, and one- and five-year relative survival rates.
Results: Overall 1,468 persons with soft-tissue sarcoma and 671 persons with bone sarcoma were identified. Age-standardized cumulative incidence was 4.5/100,000 persons for soft-tissue and 2.1/100,000 persons for bone sarcoma (European Standard). One- and five-year relative survival was 87.8% and 66.4% for soft-tissue and 91.8% and 52.9% for bone sarcoma, respectively.
Conclusion: This is the first estimation of the burden of sarcoma based on an unselected sample of routine care data and the first estimation of the burden of sarcoma in Germany. We believe that the proposed methods offer a valuable approach for further outcomes research on cancer.
Keywords: Bone sarcoma; Epidemiology; Health service research; Incidence; Outcomes research; Prevalence; Routine data; Soft-tissue sarcoma; Survival.
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