Objective: This study was designed to provide up-dated incidence figures for bladder cancer in France.
Material and method: The method used was based on modelling of the mortality/incidence ratio observed in French departments with cancer registries.
Results: The number of invasive cancers, which represent an average of slightly less than two-thirds of all bladder tumours diagnosed in France, increased in males from 5,591 in 1990 to 7,203 in 1990 and 8,986 in 2000. For females, these figures were 1,593, 1,744 and 1,787, respectively. This increase was mainly due to growth of the population, as incidence rates varied only slightly (+1.14% per year in males and -0.5% in females). Over the same period, the risk of death from bladder cancer decreased for both sexes.
Conclusion: The diversity of the classifications, which clearly reflects the difficulty of defining bladder tumours, raises problems for descriptive epidemiology. This situation will probably be clarified by the consensus reached by pathologists over recent years.