Cancer registry of RS

The Cancer Registry of Republic of Slovenia (CRS) is one of the oldest population based registries in Europe. It was founded in 1950 at the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana by the late Professor Božena Ravnihar who headed it till 1975. She was succeeded by Professor Vera Pompe-Kirn, who contributed a lot to the further development of the Registry as well as its recognition at the national and international level all until her retirement in 2003. Since 2003, the Registry together with the Unit of Epidemiology is merged in a single Epidemiology and Cancer Registry service. Besides the Cancer Registry of Slovenia, the new service also comprises the hospital-based Cancer Registry of the OIL, which contributes a considerable part of information to the CRS and facilitates a more detailed overview of patients treated at the Institute, irrespective of their permanent residence. In the last decade, we have established a new national registry in charge of coordinating and monitoring the  organised cervical cancer screening programme (ZORA), while an information system DORA to support organized breast screening program has been underway since 2007. While the existence of these two new registries contributes to a higher quality and completeness of CRS's data, the latter contribute to the evaluation of the effectiveness of screening programs.

The basic yearly result of CRS's work is the annual report. The first annual reports of the CRS for the period 1951-1955 were issued during the years 1953-1957. The first data analysis for the year 1950 was published in Zdravstveni vestnik in 1951. The data for the period 1957-1971 were appearing in the periodicals Epidemiological and Vital Statistics Report and World Health Statistics Report, both edited by World Health Organization. From 1965 onwards, the data have been appearing regularly in special bi-lingual (Slovene-English) annual reports, first entitled Cancer in Slovenia (1965-1977), and then Cancer Incidence in Slovenia(1978-2006).

Besides Annual Reports, four special publications have been published: Atlas of Cancer Incidence in Slovenia 1978-1987, Cancer Patients' Survival in Slovenia 1963-1990, Cancer Patients' Survival in Slovenia 1983-1997 and Survival of Cancer Patients, diagnosed in 1991–2005 in Slovenia. The list of other relevant publications in last five years is at the end of this report.

Data of the CRRS are included in several international databases and projects. They have been published in all nine volumes of the Cancer Incidence in Five Continents issued by International Agency for Research on Cancer. The data are included in international databases EUROCIM, GLOBOCAN and ACCIS. The survival of Slovenian cancer patients is analysed in the international studies EUROCARE II, EUROCARE III, EUROCARE IV  and EUNICE.