Zentrum für Krebsregisterdaten am Robert Koch-Institut

The Bundeskrebsregisterdatengesetz of 10 August 2009 established the Zentrum für Krebsregisterdaten at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, which began work in January 2010 in succession to the institute's earlier Dachdokumentation Krebs. The Act defines a Krebsregister as both the clinical registries the Länder must run under section 65c SGB V and their epidemiological registries, and section 5 sets out exactly which fields flow to the centre: person, tumour including method of diagnostic confirmation and TNM stage, treatment, course and death. Data are due by 31 December of the following calendar year, and each annual dataset must be deleted after two years.

The centre checks completeness against a regression-based expectation, deduplicates across state borders using control numbers, runs a public register of approved data applications and a central application office, and publishes Krebs in Deutschland with Deutsche Krebsregister e.V. every two years. The fifteenth edition, for 2021 to 2023, reports 517,800 new cancers and 228,960 cancer deaths in 2023 excluding non-melanoma skin cancer, relative five-year survival of 65 percent in women and 61 percent in men, and rates standardised against the old European population rather than the World standard used internationally, which is why German and IARC figures are not directly comparable. The centre is candid that this remains an estimate rather than a count: twelve of sixteen registries met the reference-region criteria for 2023, and Saxony-Anhalt never has.