Welcome to QCancer®

This website is primarily intended for doctors and nurses working in general practice and for academics who are interest in the underlying research. Patients are welcome to read this information and use the calculator together with their doctor so that any symptoms or concerns can be addressed within a health care setting. All medical decisions need to be taken by a patient in consultation with their doctor. The authors and the sponsors accept no responsibility for clinical use or misuse of this score.

There are several scores under the QCancer® banner.

All of the algorithms have been developed by Julia Hippisley-Cox and Carol Coupland and are based on routinely collected data from many thousands of GPs across the country who have freely contributed data to the QResearch database for medical research.

This suite of QCancer® tools has been developed for the UK population, and is intended for use in the UK.

The QCancer® scores

Today's QCancer® score

First published in 2013, this score works differently to tumour site specific scores, as it gives a risk of undiagnosed cancer for the individual across a whole range of tumour sites. It is, therefore, a patient centred score, rather than a tumour site centred score.
It works out the risk of a patient having a current but as yet undiagnosed cancer taking account of their risk factors and current symptoms. It does not give a diagnosis of cancer, but a risk of having one as yet undiagnosed.

The science underpinning the QCancer® score was published in January 2013 edition of the BJGP. The algorithms are updated and recalibrated anually, and this site implements the 2017 update.

There are two calculators, one for men and one for women:

Some useful documents describing this tool:

QCancer® implemented in EMIS Web

We are delighted that QCancer® has been fully integrated into EMIS Web. We have worked closely with EMIS and Macmillan Cancer Support on their implementation.

If you are an EMIS customer, you can find further information on their implementation of QCancer within EMIS Web at the EMIS Support centre:

The QCancer® 10 year score

QCancer®-10yr works out the risk of a patient developing cancer over the next 10 years given their individual risk factors. It does not give a diagnosis of cancer, but a risk of developing cancer over the next 10 years. Like the main QCancer® score above, it is a patient centred score, not a tumour site specific score.

There are two calculators, one for men and one for women:

We have also made a third calculator, extracted from the two above, that presents colorectal cancer by iteslf:

The QCancer® survival scores
The original QCancer®-2012 scores

In 2012, we produced several tumour site specific scores, for lung, gastro-oesophageal, renal, ovarian, pancreatic and colorectal cancer. These worked independently of each other, and we decided that we could do better, by calculating and displaying risk of other tumour sites at the same time. To do this we needed to use different, more powerful techniques, create a competing risks model. This work would become the patient centred QCancer® score described below.

We no longer host the calculators for the 2012 scores, as the 2013 patient centred model and it successors does all they did and more. If you are an academic researcher and need access to more information about the 2012 scores, then please be in touch.