Definition

A measure of the risk of a certain event happening. In cancer research, absolute risk is the likelihood that a person who is free of a specific type of cancer at a given age will develop that cancer over a certain period of time. For example, a woman 35 years of age, with no known risk factors for breast cancer, has an absolute risk of getting breast cancer over a lifetime of 90 years of about 13%, meaning she has a 1 in 8 chance of developing breast cancer. This also means the chance that she will never have breast cancer is about 87%, or 7 in 8.