Background & Objectives: Awareness of cancer incidence is essential for cancer prevention and control programs. Capture-recapture methods have been recommended for reducing bias and increase the accuracy of cancer incidence estimation. This study aimed to estimate the Gastric cancer incidence by Capture-Recapture method based on Ardabil population-based Cancer registry Data.

    Methods: All new cases of gastric cancer reported by three sources; pathology reports, death certificates and medical records that reported to Ardabil population-based cancer registry in 2006 and 2008 were enrolled to the study. The duplicate cases based on the similarity of first name, surname and father's names were identified between sources. The estimated incidence was calculated by log-linear method using Stata 12 software.

    Results: A total 857 new cases of gastric cancer were reported from three sources . After removing duplicates, th e reported incidence rate for the years 2006 and 2008 was 35.3 and 32.5 per 100,000 population respectively. The estimated incidence rate calculated by log-linear method for these years was 96.2 and 90.4 per 100,000 population respectively.

  Conclusions: These results indicate that none of the sources of pathology reports , death certificates and medical records individually or collectively were not fully covered the incidence cases of gastric cancer. W e can obtain more accurate estimates of incidence rate using the capture-recapture method .