Information about the Patient’s Occupation on Hospital-Based Cancer Records in Brazil

Abstract

Introduction: Cancer incidence and its association with occupational exposure has been known for several centuries. Nevertheless, information about the workplace and work conditions is scarce in medical records. Objective: To assess the existence, frequency and quality of occupational information for patients with malignant neoplasms, from the data collected by the hospital-based cancer records. Method: An observational and descriptive study was performed involving 1,138,951 cases from the database IntegradorRHC from Brazilian National Cancer Institute José Alencar Gomes da Silva (INCA) diagnosed between 1998 and 2011. Half of the cases without information were excluded, leaving 575,333 cases (50.5%). Selected topography was assessed to evaluate the frequency of occupations in each one of them. Results: The data showed a preponderance of certain occupations and non-uniform distribution in the different topographies selected, suggesting that the distribution of occupations varies depending su the tumor location. Conclusion: Due to the limitation of data, there’s an evident need to motivate health professionals to collect appropriated information and to conduct new studies to adjust the distribution of occupations according to the general population and controlling biases that may have affected the relative frequency of the number of cases from the database of the hospital-based cancer records.