title: Incidence, time trends and regional variation of childhood leukaemia in Germany and Europe.
abstract: This paper presents data on the German and Europe-wide incidence, time trends and regional variations of childhood leukaemia. Data were provided by the German Childhood Cancer Registry (GCCR), a population-based cancer registry recording all cases of malignant diseases in children under 15 y of age residing in Germany and by the Automated Childhood Cancer Information System (ACCIS) co-ordinated at International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, that combines and evaluates data from several European population-based cancer registries. The incidence of leukaemia (44.0 per million) has increased in Europe as well as in Germany in the last decades (0.6% annually on average). Germany shows no systematic aggregation of regions with low or high cancer incidence in terms of regional clustering. Incidence rates differ between European regions with the highest rates in Northern Europe (48.0 per million) and the lowest rates in Eastern Europe (39.1). Altogether, the results from ACCIS and the GCCR show good agreement.
authors.affiliation: German Childhood Cancer Registry, Institute of Medical Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Obere Zahlbacher Strasse 69, 55131 Mainz, Germany. kaatsch@imbei.uni-mainz.de
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kaatsch
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mergenthaler
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005060:Europe / Q000453:epidemiology; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007938:Leukemia / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008297:Male; D012042:Registries / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*