Variance of complete cancer prevalence at all ages

Abstract

Cancer prevalence is the proportion of people in a population diagnosed with cancer in the past and still alive. One way to estimate prevalence is via population-based registries, where data on diagnosis and life status of all incident cases occurring in the covered population are collected. In this paper a method for the estimation of the variance of complete prevalence at all ages combined has been investigated. The proposed solution consists of estimating an upper bound of the variance of interest. Simulations show that the upper bound works well, however a theoretical proof has not been found. The paper is organized as follows: after a brief introduction in section 1, the problem is illustrated in section 2; a new solution is proposed in section 3 and applied to a simulated data set in section 4; and finally some technical advice on how to modify the existing software is proposed in section 5.