KOCHI: The estimated total cancer burden in India is expected to increase substantially from about 15.1 lakh new cases in 2017 to 17.3 lakh cases in 2020. This shocking data was revealed at the 33rd annual review meeting of the National Cancer Register Programme (NCRP) of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which began here on Tuesday. Eminent cancer specialists, medical professionals, government officers and other stakeholders are attending the meeting hosted by the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS), which has been running cancer registry since 2004.
The event will review the quality of cancer-related data generated across the country over the past few years and discuss the activities and achievements of National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research (NCDIR), which manages NCRP based on population and hospital."ICMR's National Cancer Registry Programme is the only disease surveillance programme existing in India for the past 35 years. We started in small numbers but now we have 33 population-based, 101 hospital-based, and 3 corporation-based cancer registries under the NCRP in India. These registries function as a health intelligence unit to tackle the risk factors of disease," said Prashant Mathur, director of NCDIR.
The programme records and generates data based on cancer cases and provides statistics of specific patterns of the disease appearing all over the nation. This may be helpful for executing various measures to control cancer in terms of prevention as well as optimisation of treatment outcomes.
"Cancer is not a notifiable disease in India and, hence, active methods of information collection are essential. It is necessary to maintain the records of cancer patients at hospitals. However, this is not followed by all due to fear regarding the collection of information that we are misusing them. It is not the identity, but the disease that matters," said P Gangadharan, head of cancer registry, AIMS.