Corrected cancer mortality rates for the elderly in the states of the Brazilian northeast

Abstract

Estimates of the true magnitude of mortality in the Brazilian northeast has been fraught with major obstacles due to underreporting and problems with the quality of information on the basic causes of death. The scope of this study was to evaluate the impact of the redistribution of deaths corrected by Active Search Research and Garbage codes on the mortality rates of the major types of cancer among the elderly in the northeastern states. The Ledermann method was used to reallocate the deaths. The number of deaths before and after the correction revealed a significant variation, especially the figures for breast cancer where the variation was 53.5%. With corrected data, the elderly aged 80 years or older had a prostate cancer death rate which was 18 times higher than those aged 60 to 64 years. Higher levels of prostate cancer deaths among men, and breast cancer among women, were observed in all of the northeastern states. Tracheal, bronchial, lung and stomach cancer resulted in different levels of distribution according to gender, with higher rates among men than among women. Correction of death data resulted in significant increases in the number of recorded deaths. The methodology adopted in this work was the simple application of feasible factual data by the information system managers.