1 Introduction

The UK Biobank receives cancer diagnoses for participants on a regular basis through linkage to national cancer registries. In this report we present summary statistics on the most common malignant cancer diagnoses within the UK Biobank cohort (excluding benign, non-malignant, unspecified and undefined cancers). The numbers of cases of cancers is provided by broad cancer groupings according to ICD10 or ICD9 codes.

Malignancy in these reports is determined by reference to ICD10 code. There are other ways to determine malignancy, eg ICD-O morphology codes, which are also available in category 100092 of the UKB dataset.

ICD10 diagnosis code C44 - non-melanoma skin cancer - is excluded from the calculation of prevalent and incident cancers.

A cancer is classed as ‘undefined’ if it was recorded with an ICD9 code that does not unambiguously map to an ICD10 code.

1.1 Information on this report

  • This report was created on the 18 March, 2024.
  • This report includes complete follow-up up to the current UK Biobank censoring date for cancer registry data.
  • The latest cancer registry record linked to UKBiobank data was the 13 May, 2022
  • A report summarising all prevalent and incident cancers (including benign, non-malignant and unspecified cancers) can be found here in the report entitled “Cancer Numbers Report”.
  • Summary figures of fewer than five participants have been anonymised, per UK Biobank’s guidance on reporting for uncommon and geographical variables. Please refer to the Useful Links section of this page for more information.

2 Summary of Prevalent Malignant Cancers

Prevalent malignant cancers were those diagnosed prior to recruitment to the Biobank study (prior to the baseline assessment). If a participant was diagnosed with a particular cancer both before and after baseline, only the prevalent cancer is counted. If there were several dates of diagnoses for a particular cancer, the earliest date is counted. If at the earliest date, a participant received diagnoses for multiple types of prevalent cancer the participant is counted for each cancer type for which they were diagnosed.

Prior to recruitment to the Biobank study 25961 participants had been diagnosed with malignant cancer with a mean age at diagnosis of 52.1. Of these, 63% were women.

Sex N Percent Mean Age at Diagnosis
F 16441 63 50.7
M 9520 37 54.6


2.1 Top 20 most common prevalent malignant cancers


Figure 1: 20 most common prevalent malignant cancer diagnoses within the UK Biobank cohort



2.2 Top 20 prevalent malignant cancers by sex

Figure 2: 20 most common prevalent malignant cancers within the UK Biobank cohort by sex