Cancer: Young People
(asked on 17th March 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department collects data on how many young people with cancer were diagnosed at stage (a) one and (b) two.
The National Disease Registration Service in NHS England, as the national cancer registry, collects diagnosis and treatment data on cancer patients in England. Data is available at the following link:
The most recent published data on registrations of cancer in young people is in the Accredited Official Statistics on Cancer Registrations covering 2022, which is available at the following link:
Young people, those aged zero to 24 years old, are diagnosed with types of cancer that are only stageable in half of all cases. Of those diagnoses which are stageable, the proportion of diagnoses with a valid recorded stage that are diagnosed at stage 1 is 35%. Of those diagnoses which are stageable, the proportion of diagnoses with a valid recorded stage that are diagnosed at stage 2 is 26%.
The most recent published data on how young people presented with cancer is in the Rapid Cancer Registration Data set. The most recent complete year for which data is available is 2023. Further information is available at the following link:
https://digital.nhs.uk/ndrs/data/data-sets/rcrd
Approximately 39% of young people first present in hospital as an emergency presentation.
Some of the most common cancers diagnosed in young people, like brain tumours, have very significant symptoms associated with them, and in these cases the recommended course of action is to attend accident and emergency rather than following a managed pathway.