Acoustic Neuromas (Hansard, 20 December 2004)

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.

Letter front the National Statistician, Len Cook, to Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer, dated 17 December 2004.

As National Statistician, I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question asking what proportion of the population is estimated to have acoustic neurones. (HL355)

I have assumed that the question is actually seeking information on acoustic neuromas (a rare type of benign cancer of the acoustic nerves)—rather than acoustic neurones, which are present in the whole population.

There were 265 newly diagnosed cases of cancer in England in 2001 which were coded to cranial nerves (based on ICD10 code D33.3) with the morphology code for neurilemmoma (M9560/0) which includes acoustic neuroma. (Therefore not all of these may have been cases of acoustic neuroma).

These figures, aggregated at the 3rd and 4th digits of the International Classification of Diseases Tenth Revision (ICD10), were published in Cancer statistics: registrations, England 2001 Series MB1 no. 32. London: The Stationery Office, 2004, which is available on the National Statistics website at: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme-health/MB1_32/MB1_32.pdf

Figures on the number of people who have been diagnosed with cancer and are still alive at a particular point in time are not routinely calculated.