If reliable cause of death information is available, which survival measure can be used?

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When reliable cause-of-death information is available, you can isolate deaths due to the cancer and treat all other deaths as censored, giving a direct estimate of survival free from cancer death. This is what cause-specific survival measures. It answers the question: what is the probability of not dying from this cancer within a given time, using the actual cause-of-death data to separate cancer deaths from others? If you rely on overall survival, you include deaths from any cause, which doesn’t tell you about cancer-specific risk. Relative survival and net survival estimate cancer impact without needing exact cause-of-death data, often using population life tables, so they’re useful when cause-of-death data are unreliable. But with reliable cause-of-death information, cause-specific survival provides the clearest cancer-specific picture.