The West Virginia Cancer Registry: historical development and preliminary results

This article is designed to provide the medical community with an overview of the West Virginia Cancer Registry (WVCR), a population-based registry, which was established in 1993 with both federal and state funding. The WVCR is managed through the Bureau for Public Health's Division of Surveillance and Disease Control in the Office of Epidemiology and Health Promotion, and all data is confidential. The staff of the WVCR consists of a director, a cancer data supervisor, two abstractors, a secretary, and a voluntary, 13-member Cancer Advisory Committee. The initial findings of the WVCR have shown that for each 100,000 West Virginia women, 90.1 were discovered with invasive breast cancer in 1992, an increase from 86.8 in 1991. The invasive cervical cancer rate increased from 10.8 to 12.9 during this same time period. In addition, the age-adjusted death rate for cervical cancer rose from 3.6 cases per 100,000 women in 1991 to 3.8 in 1992. However, the age-adjusted death rate for breast cancer fell to 24.7 per 100,000 women in 1992, compared to 25.5 in 1991.