Epidemiological Trends of GI Cancers in Patients Visiting a Tertiary Care Hospital in Chandigarh, North India

Background: Cancer has become an epidemic disease. Nearly ten million new cancer cases are diagnosedannually in the world and out of these about half are from the developing world. To appropriately plan fortreatment, management and prevention of the disease, it becomes necessary to study the trends about morbiditycaused by cancers. Materials and
Methods: Data for patients diagnosed with any form of gastrointestinal (GI)cancers was extracted from records maintained in the outpatient department registers of the Oncology Departmentof Government Medical College and Hospital in Chandigarh from 1999 to 2012. Trends were analysed fordifferent categories of GI cancers for the period of 12 years.
Results: In present study GI cancers accountedfor 23 % of all registered cases (n-9603) of carcinomas. Males predominated for all GI cancers except in thegall bladder. Gastrointestinal cancers as a proportion of total cancers increased from 21% in 1999 to 25.9% in2012 with a significant increasing trend in our series (χ2 for linear trend=9.36, p<0.003). Cancers of the tonsil,oral cavity and pharynx taken together showed an increasing trend over the years (χ2 for trend=55.2, p<0.001)whereas cancers of the lower GI (χ2=19.6, p<0.0001) and gall bladder (χ2=19.5, p<0.0001) showed a decliningtrend in our series.
Conclusions: GI cancers form a significant proportion of all cancers reporting to our data.In depth studies to ascertain the reasons for the changing trends are required to design intervention programs.Further information is necessary from cancer registries and from the hospital records of oncology departments.