消除对早产癌症死亡的社会经济和种族差异的影响
2011-09-18 19:45:45   来源：37度医学网   作者：  评论：0 点击：

Estimates of the expected numbers of new cancer cases and cancer deaths should be interpreted cautiously because these estimates are model-based and may vary considerably from year to year for reasons other than changes in cancer occurrence. For instance, estimates are invariably affected by changes in method, which occur regularly as modeling techniques improve over time. For example, the introduction of a new method for projecting incident cancer cases in 2007 substantially affected the estimates for a number of cancers, particularly leukemia and female breast. 8 In addition, not all changes in cancer trends can be captured by modeling techniques. For these reasons, we discourage the use of these estimates to track year-to-year changes in cancer occurrence and death. The preferred data sources for tracking cancer trends are age-standardized or age-specific cancer death rates from the NCHS and cancer incidence rates from SEER or NPCR, even though these data are 3 and 4 years old, respectively, by the time that they become available. Nevertheless, the American Cancer Society projections of the number of new cancer cases and deaths provide a reasonably accurate estimate of the current cancer burden in the United States.

Errors in reporting race/ethnicity in medical records and on death certificates may result in underestimates of cancer incidence and mortality rates in nonwhite and non-African American populations. It is also important to note that cancer data in the United States are primarily reported for broad racial and ethnic minority groups that are not homogenous, and thus important difference in the cancer burden within racial/ethnic subgroups are often masked.