Where to Find 2014 Cancer Statistics and Estimates

With cancer accounting for approximately 1 in 4 US deaths it is important to know a good resource for cancer-related statistics.  Luck for us, the 2014 Cancer Facts and Figures has just been released by the American Cancer Society.  This is an excellent resource on the distribution of cancer by age, sex, race, type, and geographic location in the United States.  It includes cancer specific information on new cases, deaths, signs and symptoms, risk factors, prevention, early detection, treatment, and survival.  This is a wonderful, up-to-date resource for getting cancer-related estimates on prevalence, incidence, mortality, and survival in the US as well as look at trends and statistics from years past.  In addition, the website includes a wealth of other resources including tables, slides, and figures that are handy visual aids for presentations.

Produce SAS Proc Freq Output in R

I have never been a huge fan or advocate of SAS, and actually recommend using other SAS alternatives, but I am somewhat addicted to the SAS Proc Freq procedure and its output tables.  Its a nice way to not only visualize the data but also to get some useful summary statistics.  I have been using the R table command for a while and in most cases combined with margin.table or prop.table it suffices to summarize the data.  Recently, I have been in need of summary statistics for the tables as well.  This can be accomplished easy enough using the R chisq.test or fisher.test commands, but still doesn't quite provide the fluid integration of data visualization and summary statistics that the SAS Proc Freq output provides.  Today I came across the R package CrossTable.  This procedure, part of the gmodels library, provides formatted output very similar to that of Proc Freq.  So much so, it even uses the same ascii characters to delineate cell boundaries.  There is a bit of playing around with options and such to get the exact statistics and percentages and such you would like, but overall a very nice (a not to mention free) alternative to SAS's Proc Freq output.  Below is an example table I created.