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The national office that pools the data of Switzerland's 13 cantonal cancer registries. Since 2020 every Swiss cancer must by law be reported, with its stage and first treatment, and this office turns that into national figures, including how well breast and prostate cancer are being treated.
Adult cancer registration in Switzerland is cantonal: 13 cantonal registries record each new case in the population of the canton where the patient lives, and the Childhood Cancer Registry in Bern records those under 20. The NKRS does not register cases itself; it collects, checks, harmonises and analyses what the cantonal registries send, and passes the national dataset to the Federal Statistical Office, which publishes the annual cancer monitoring.
The office is run by the Foundation National Institute for Cancer Epidemiology and Registration (NICER), founded in Zurich in 2007 out of the Association of Swiss Cancer Registries of 1978, and mandated by the Federal Department of Home Affairs since 2018 under Article 33 of the Cancer Registration Act (KRG) and Article 36 of its ordinance. The Act, passed by Parliament in March 2016 and in force since 1 January 2020, introduced a duty to report, the AHV insurance number as the person identifier and a standard national dataset. Reports are due within four weeks; patients are informed and may object at any time, and data are registered no earlier than three months after the report so that a patient has time to decide.
Because the Act asks for diagnosis and first-treatment data, the NKRS now publishes care-quality indicators from the whole country: 38 indicators on more than 20,000 breast cancers and precursors from 2020 to 2022, and 32 on more than 35,000 prostate cancers from 2020 to 2023. In the prostate report, published in September 2026 with Swiss Urology, 76 per cent of cancers were found by opportunistic early-detection testing, the treatment decision was made at a tumour board in 56 per cent of cases (85 per cent in breast cancer), and 20 per cent of men were on active surveillance; the report names avoidable overdiagnosis and overtreatment and recommends evaluating an organised early-detection programme.
The authors read the pattern as more overdiagnosis of lower-risk cancer alongside a rise in advanced diagnoses, and see room to organise early detection better, the same conclusion the NKRS care-quality report reached.
Swiss screening starts at 50; the authors call for prevention, awareness and screening strategies adapted to younger adults.
Shares Rising early-onset colorectal cancer in Switzerland despite declining incidence in older adults: a nationwide population-based study, 1980-2021, HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer.
Shares Overdiagnosis and false alarms, HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer, Prostate cancer.
Shares Swiss Childhood Cancer Registry (Kinderkrebsregister), Prostate cancer.
Shares Overdiagnosis and false alarms, HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer, Prostate cancer.
Shares Overdiagnosis and false alarms, HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer.
Shares Overdiagnosis and false alarms, HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer, Prostate cancer.
Shares Overdiagnosis and false alarms, HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer.
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