Cancer mortality in Menofeia, Egypt: comparison with US mortality rates

In developing countries where cancer registries are unavailable, mortality statistics from death certification may be a practical source of cancer statistics. We aimed at describing the cancer mortality in Egypt and comparing it to that in the US.

We used the mandatory and routinely available mortality records of Menofeia province in the Nile Delta region of Egypt, which is typical of the rest of Egypt. We determined cancer mortality rates, and compared them with the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) mortality rates of the US.

Bladder and liver cancers were the two most common causes of cancer mortality in Menofeia, Egypt. When adjusted for age the Egyptian rates were much higher than the US rates (9.5/100,000 and 8.4/100,000 for bladder and liver cancer, respectively, compared with 2.3/100,000 and 2.5/100,000 for the same cancers from SEER data). We also observed that age-specific rates for early-onset colorectal cancer under age 40 and premenopausal breast cancer were higher in Egypt than in the US.

This study confirms our earlier observations about the higher proportion of early-onset colorectal cancer in Egypt, and opens the door for future studies to investigate familial clustering of cancer in Egypt.