Table 2 Summary of patient characteristics and data quality indicators for incident childhood cancers, Ireland, 1994–2000, and comparison with European (EUROCARE‐3)² and US (SEER) data⁸.

	Ireland 1994–2000		Europe 1990–94		USA 1994–2000
	Cases	%	Mean (%)	National range (%)	%
All cases	787	100.0
Boys	425	54.0	56	49–70	54.4
0–4 years of age	327	41.6	45	35–56	46.5
5–9 years of age	208	26.4			26.4
10–14 years of age	252	32.0			27.2
Microscopic verification	740	94.0	93	79–100	95.5
Death certificate‐ or autopsy‐only*	4	0.5	0.6	0–5.9	0.4
Unspecified cases†	44	5.6	3.4	0–14.9	2.2
Lost to follow‐up‡	NA	NA	1.1	0–7.0
Alive with follow‐up <4 years	183	23.2	6.9	0–22.2

*Three death certificate‐only and one autopsy‐only cases were excluded from survival analyses.

†Unspecified cases: cases assigned to non‐specific ICCC categories Ie, IIe, IIIf, VIc, VIIc, VIIIe, IXe or XIIb (cf table 1).

‡Loss to follow‐up was not directly available for Irish cases, as follow‐up was based mainly on comprehensive death certificate linkage.