Estimation of the Gastric Cancer Incidence in Tehran by Two-Source Capture-recapture

Introduction: Capture-recapture methods have been suggested for reducing costs of disease registration as wellas reducing bias in incidence estimations. This study aimed to estimate the gastric cancer incidence in theTehranmetropolis population during 2002-2006. Materials and
Methods: We investigated new cases of gastric cancerreported by three sources; death certificates, pathology reports, and medical records to Tehran population-basedcancer registry during 2002-2006. G2 statistics and the two-source capture-recapture method were used to selectthe best-fitted log-linear model and to estimate incidence, respectively. EXCEL software version 2007 and SPSSsoftware version 16 were used for this research.
Results: The number of reported cases was 4,463, with an averageage of 68.5 (±12.9) years. We found the model that combined two sources of data including pathology reports andmedical records and furthermore complemented by death certificates as the best model. The reported and theestimated incidences were 11.0 and 27.1 per 100,000 respectively.
Conclusions: The incidence estimated by twosourcecapture-recapture method is about three times higher than the incidence reported by the sources underinvestigation. It is recommended to move towards the implementation of population-based cancer registrationusing various sources of data collection to achieve more accurate data.