STATISTICAL TESTS FOR THE COMPARISON OF THE INCIDENCE OR MORTALITY RATES IN CANCER REGISTRY AND DESCRIPTIVE EPIDEMIOLOGY ---A MICROCOMPUTER PROGRAM IN BASIC

This paper describes the statistical methods of the comparison of the incidence or mortality rates in cancer registry and descriptive epidemiology, and the features of microcomputer program (CANTEST) which was designed to perform the methods. The program was written in IBM BASIC language. Using the program CANTEST we presented here tlie user can do several statistical tests or estimations as follow: 1. the comparison of the adjusted rates which were calculated by directly or indirectly standardized methods, 2. the calculation of the slope of regression line for testing the linear trends of the adjusted rates, 3. the estimation of the 95% or 99% confidenee intervals of the directly adjusted rates, of the cumulative rates (0-64 and 0-74), and of the cumulative risk. Several examples are presented for testing the performances of the program.