A European collaborative initiative to systematically map cancer risk by migration background: the Cancer RADAR...

The World Health Organization (WHO) Action Plan for Refugee and Migrant Health highlights the need for strengthened migration health governance and data-informed policies. A major barrier in Europe has been the lack of systematically collected and comparable cancer data stratified by migration background.

This study assesses the availability of routine data to map and examines differences of cancer risk among those with a migration background in Europe. The cancer types selected (breast, colorectal, cervical, stomach, liver, and lung) are either infection-related or amenable to detection through screening. In collaboration with pilot population-based cancer registries, a framework was developed to collect cancer data stratified by country of birth.

Feasibility was high: 48 of 80 registries (60%) are able and willing to share data and eight (10%) intend to retrieve and share data, together from 22 countries. Reasons for data sharing included the prospects of reducing cancer inequalities and enhancing registry visibility, while barriers included time constraints, lack of resources, and the need for ethical and legal approval, particularly for data linkage. A protocol and analysis tool, co-developed with pilot registries, supports data collection of comparable effect measures while ensuring protection through anonymisation and aggregation. The data collection enables analysis of cancer estimates in inequality and trends, including major events such as the war in Ukraine.

Cancer RADAR provides a framework for the systematic and comparable collection of cancer data by migration background, collaboratively, across Europe. This work represents a necessary enabling step toward standardised international comparisons and supports data-driven policies to address cancer inequalities.