Marcadis AR, et al. - This study was intended to define disease-specific and relative survival rates for patients with early-stage cancers, to better understand which cancers may be of lower risk and more likely to be diagnosed in otherwise healthy, health-conscious individuals. Physicians may apply net measures such as disease-specific survival—the proportion of patients not dying of their cancer in a given time frame, when explaining cancer survival statistics to patients. Another complementary statistic is relative survival, which analyzes the survival of a cancer population to a similar population without cancer, matched for age, race, and gender. Although relative survival also incorporates characteristics—beyond cancer—that distinguish these patients, these measures are often numerically similar. It is demonstrated that if individuals with particular cancers often also tend to engage in lifestyle or health behaviors that impair survival, such as smoking, their relative survival will be lower. The converse is also true: individuals with certain cancers might have higher relative survival if the cancer is principally identified unexpectedly or through screening because individuals receiving preventive care also engage in other healthy behaviors (the healthy-user effect).