The contribution of population-based cancer registries to the current knowledge on cancer epidemiology: the example of skin melanoma

• Main Author: Crocetti, Emanuele
• Other Authors: Clough-Gorr, Kerri
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University College Cork 2018
• Subjects: Epidemiology; Cancer; Registry; Melanoma; Quality; Faroe Islands; Greenland; Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10468/10112

Introduction The activity of cancer registries represents a multistep process that starts by gathering information from a variety of sources. Such information is checked, linked, enriched and handled to produce high-quality original data capable of being informative enough to prove useful in answering specific epidemiological and clinical questions. This thesis is part of a PhD by Prior Publication grounded in six published papers. These papers deal with different steps in the production of cancer registry data, enhancing the contribution of registries to cancer epidemiology. Skin melanoma has been used as an example, but all the presented methods and concepts apply to any cancer type. Materials and methods 1. The first paper (related to cancer registry data quality) tests the hypothesis whether the distribution of the first digit (from one to nine) of crude incidence rates obeys Benford law. Pearson’s coefficient of correlation and different distance measures were applied to compare the theoretical distribution to the observed one in a sample of 43 population-based cancer registry populations randomly drawn from the volume X of Cancer Incidence in 5 Continents. 2. In the second paper, an innovative index for measuring the amount of internal variability among the sub-areas underlying an overall incidence rate is presented. The measure is a ratio, where the numerator is the difference between the highest and the lowest age-adjusted standardised rate in sub-areas. The denominator is the overall area age-adjusted standardised rate. Such measure was applied to age-standardised incidence rates for ‘all cancer sites excluding non-melanoma skin cancer’, for men, in 2014, for Nordic countries as a whole, for each country (Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Sweden and Norway) and their regions. 3. In paper three, to make cancer registry data useful in the clinical setting, melanoma incidence during 1985–2004 in the Tuscan cancer registry (Italy) was analysed including both standard (site, morphology, ...