ABSTRACT
Aim: To estimate the change in years of life lost [YLL] due to gastric cancer mortality after correcting formisclassification in registering causes of death using the Bayesian method
Background: For evaluating the health status of a country and determining priority of risk factors, some epidemiologicindicators are needed. Due to premature death, YLL is one of the most widely used indicators. To have an exact estimate ofYLL, an accurate death registry data is needed, but the Iranian death registry is subject to misclassification error
Material and methods: Gastric cancer mortality data from 2006 to 2010 for Iran were extracted from national deathstatistics. The rate of misclassification in registered causes of deaths was estimated, using Bayesian method for eachyear. Then YLL of gastric cancer is estimated for different age-sex categories before and after implementing Bayesianmethod
Results: Using Bayesian method, the estimated misclassification rate for gastric cancer in cancer without label group were 5%,3%, 3%, 7% and 7% respectively from 2006 to 2010. Estimated Years of life lost due to gastric cancer before correctingmisclassification were respectively 111684.93, 114957.31, 112391.93, 112250.53 and 113300.92 person-years for years 2006to 2010. After correcting misclassification, the total YLL of gastric cancer increased to 1535.19, 921.11, 908.39, 2566.39 and2507.00 person-years, respectively from 2006 to 2010
Conclusion: If health policy makers ignore the existence of misclassification in registered causes of death, they mayunderestimate the burden of some causes of death and overestimate some others