Completeness of Colorectal Cancer Pathology Reports in Iranian National Population-Based Cancer Registry System

Abstract

Background: Colorectal cancer is one of the top 5 common cancers in Iran with over 1.9 million new cases. Completeness of pathology reports is one of the key factors of cancer care management. So, sufficient reporting of pathological factors is vital for optimum diagnosis, projection of prognosis and patient care. Objectives: To support epidemiological research, we determined the completeness of colorectal cancer pathology reports at the nationwide level. Methods: Accessing to the text of pathology reports from a web-based application that was created by the Iranian National Population-Based Cancer Registry (INPCR) was considered the most complete and reliable. We requested that the INPCR extracts their pathology records for manual review for colorectal cancer (ICD-10 code ‘C18’, ‘C19’, ‘C20’, and 'C21'). Results: Exclusion criteria were applied and 2092 pathology reports were analyzed. The mean age of patients was 61 years; 56% were male. A vast number of colorectal cancer cases were at T3-stage (colon 68.4%, rectal 58.6%) and N0-stage (colon 55.7%, rectal 57%). Information on key prognostic factors, such as lymphovascular and perineural was frequently lacking (22.7% and 35.7% missing, respectively). On the other hand, Tumor type and tumor grade had a high percentage of reporting (100% and 100%, respectively). In addition, our study revealed a low rate of overall complete reporting (colon 0.2%, rectal 1.1%). Conclusions: Optimum diagnosis, prediction of prognosis, and patient care require sufficient reporting of pathological factors, so efforts should be made to improve the reporting of overall pathology factors of Colorectal cancer (CRC).