Analysis of individual records of health services provision related to oral cancer in Colombia

Abstract

We have carefully reviewed the paper entitled “Epidemiological study of oral cancer in Colombia 1989-2008” (1) and would like to make some comments about it. While the author estimates incidence rates of oral cancer in Colombia during that period based on the data from the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología (INC), the denominator used to calculate the frequency, either incidence or prevalence, is not provided; this makes the comparison with the published literature difficult. Motivated by this work, we conducted an analysis of the Individual Records of Health Services Provision (RIPS by its acronym in Spanish) obtained from the Sispro database between 2010 and 2014, using the same ICD-10 codes of the aforementioned study and the denominator population projections of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) for the middle term (that is 2012). The results were classified by age in five-year periods and gender.

Keywords

• Medicine
• Health
• Oncology
• Oral cancer