The first standard reference work on the epidemiology of cancer in Thailand. Apart from offering a comprehensive overview of cancer incidence in Thailand, the book uncovers a number of geographical differences in incidence, suggesting important behavioural, environmental, or industrial risk factors that deserve further study.
The opening chapters present background information about the country and its population, discuss trends in cancer mortality over the past two decades, and describe the sources of data maintained in the country's central cancer registry and four regional registries. The results from the four regional cancer registries and the combined data set are presented in a forty-page series of tables. Detailed data on numbers of cases and incidence rates are given for cancer at all sites. Additional tables show the distribution by histological type for 10 selected cancers: nasopharynx, oesophagus, liver, lung, non-melanoma skin, cervix uteri, ovary, bladder, thyroid, and leukaemia.
The final and most extensive chapter, which includes 57 pages of tables, analyzes the results for 25 different cancers and for childhood cancer. For each cancer, differences in the patterns of incidence, observed both within Thailand and in comparison with other parts of the world, are discussed in terms of possible causative factors. Of particular interest are possible explanations for the very high incidence of liver cancer seen in Thailand, with the northeastern region showing the world's highest incidence rate. Infection with the liver fluke, Opisthorchis viverrini, is cited as being convincingly linked to the high rates of cholangio-carcinomas observed in this part of Thailand.
