Researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry, the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the Union for International Cancer Control have developed CanStaging+, a user-friendly tool aimed at facilitating the recording of comparable cancer staging data worldwide.
The collection of staging data at population-level is currently undertaken by population-based cancer registries. There is a large variation of data collected making it difficult to benchmark and to develop global strategies.
“Almost half of registries in Latin America and the Caribbean (52%) report staging information compared to 96% of registries in North America and Europe,” said Anna Gavin, who led the work from the Northern Ireland Cancer registry Centre for Public Health at Queen’s University Belfast.
A lack of data and inconsistency is a huge problem in high-income countries too where there were 6-37% of missing staging data for colorectal cancer across seven countries within the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership between 2010 and 2014.
To mark the launch of the CanStaging+ tool, an accompanying article has been published in The Lancet Oncology.
