Abstract
The conduct of public health surveillance and epidemiologicinvestigations would be enhanced by a cost-effective method for thecollection of population-based cancer risk-factor data. We assessed thefeasibility of ascertaining such data from hospital medical records duringroutine abstraction of information from a cancer registry. We examined themedical records of a representative sample of prostate and lung cancer casesdiagnosed during 1992 and 1993 from the New Mexico (United States) TumorRegistry (NMTR) database. Registry personnel abstracted ancillary informationfrom the medical records of 575 prostate and 273 lung cancer cases. Ofmedical records from 848 cases, 90 percent documented a history of tobaccouse, 77 percent contained any family medical history, and 48 percentdocumented occupational information sufficient to allow coding into standardoccupational groups. Availability of occupation and industry varied bypatient ethnicity, age at diagnosis, marital status , and type of hospital,indicating the potential for bias in studies using occupational informationfrom medical records. Our findings suggest that risk factor informationabstracted from medical records may provide valuable information for publichealth surveillance, but is generally too incomplete to serve as a singlesource of exposure information for etiologic studies. Family histories inmedical records may be sufficient for population-based ascertainment ofaffected relative pairs for genetic epidemiology studies for some cancertypes.
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Gilliland, F.D., Larson, M. & Chao, A. Risk factor information found in medical records of lung and prostate cancer cases, New Mexico Tumor Registry (United States). Cancer Causes Control 8, 598–604 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018494313389
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018494313389