Iranian Journal of

Background and Objectives: completeness of registration is used as one of the measures of the quality of a cancer registry, which is the degree to which reportable incident cases of cancer in the population of interest is actually recorded in the registry.

Methods: After removing the duplicates, a total of 471 new cases of esophagus cancer reported by three sources of pathology reports, medical records, and death certificates to Ardabil Province Cancer Registry Center in 2006 and 2008 were enrolled in the study. The incidence rate was estimated based on the capture-recapture method and the use of the log-linear models. BIC, G2 and Akaike statistics were used to select the best-fit model.

Results: In this study, a model with linkage between pathology reports and medical records and a model with death certificates alone, independent of the previous two sources, was the best fitted model. The estimated total completeness of esophagus cancer in 2006 and 2008 was 36% .The source that had the most completeness for esophagus cancers was pathology reports with 21.17%. The estimated incidence rate calculated by the log-linear method for the years 2006 and 2008 was 49.71 and 53.87 per 100,000 population, respectively.

Conclusion: Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that the low degree of completeness in Ardabil Province requires some changes in data abstracting and case finding such as the use of personal national code and electronic health records to create a more accurate cancer registry.