Introduction and terminology a. Those factors in animals' environment that combine together to cause the induction of cancer. Descriptive epidemiology of domestic animal cancer a. The descriptive epidemiology of a neoplastic disease is generally determined by two methods. Case series studies.
Information is gathered about a collection of individuals with the disease in question.
Breed, age, and sex are basic items of information summarized by these studies. In addition, more detailed information may be summarized, including various aspects of the clinical presentation, history, diagnostic testing data and outcome of the disease. This is often a misleading source of descriptive characteristics of animals at high risk and should in general not be used. Descriptive prevalence or incidence studies. The populations are also usually subdivided into easily identified groups and the incidence or prevalence of the disease within each of these groups estimated.