A ten-year (2009-2018) database of cancer mortality rates in Italy
Creators: name: Di Paola, Arianna
name: Cazzolla Gatti, Roberto
name: Monaco, Alfonso
name: Velichevskaya, Alena
name: Amoroso, Nicola
name: Bellotti, Roberto
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: cancer disease
disease-induced mortality
annual mortality census
Italy
SMR
ICD-10

description: A ten-year (2009-2018) database on cancer mortality rates (in the form of Standardized Mortality Ratios, SMR) for 23 cancer macro-types, as defined by the International ICD-10 classification system, is presented. SMR was computed over Italy at municipal, provincial, and regional scale. Our aim is to make easily accessible a comprehensive, ready-to-use and openly accessible source of data on the most updated status of cancer mortality in Italy for local and national stakeholders, researchers and policy makers and to provide researchers with ready-to-use data to perform specific studies.
description: According to eqns (2-3), the SMR for a given administrative unit strongly depends on the population size. Indeed, from eqn.(2) the smaller the population size, the lower the expected mortality (<sup>E</sup>m) and, thus, the higher the SMR (from eqn.(1)). Hence, for municipalities of less than 5,000 inhabitants data on mortality are probably not representative enough and, therefore, we suggest avoiding the use of SMR for these municipalities. Moreover, we overall recommend the use of lower limit confidence of average time-series gor geographical analisys.
description: For a given locality, year and cause of death, the SMR is the ratio between the observed number of deaths (<sup>O</sup>m) and the number of expected deaths (<sup>E</sup>m): <em>SMR</em> = <sup>O</sup>m/<sup>E</sup>m (1) where <sup>O</sup>m should be an available observational data and <sup>E</sup>m is estimated as the weighted sum of age-specific population size for the given locality (n<sub>i</sub>) per age-specific death rates of reference population (<sup>M</sup>R<sub>i</sub>): <sup>E</sup>m = sum(<sup>M</sup>R<sub>i</sub> x n<sub>i</sub>) (2) <sup>M</sup>R<sub>i </sub>could be provided by a public health organization or be estimated as the ratio between the age-specific number of deaths of reference population (M<sub>i</sub>) to the age-specific reference population size (N<sub>i</sub>): <sup>M</sup>R<sub>i</sub> = M<sub>i</sub>/N<sub>i</sub> (3) Thus, the value of Em is weighted by the age distribution of deaths and population size. SMR assumes value 1 when the number of observed and expected deaths are equal. Following the eqns. (1-3), the SMR was computed for single years of the period 2009-2018 and for single cause of death as defined by the International ICD-10 classification system by using the following data: age-specific number of deaths by cause of reference population (i.e., <em>M<sub>i</sub></em>) from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT, (http://www.istat.it/en/, last access: 26/01/2022)); age-specific census data on reference population (i.e., <em>N<sub>i</sub></em>) from ISTAT; observed number of deaths by cause (i.e., <em><sup>O</sup>m</em>) from ISTAT; age-specific census data on population (<em>n<sub>i</sub></em>); the SMR was estimated at three different level of aggregation: municipal, provincial (equivalent to the European classification NUTS 3) and regional (i.e., NUTS2). The SMR was also computed for the broad category of malignant tumors (i.e. C00-C979, hereinafter cancer macro-type C), and for the broad category of malignant tumor plus non-malignant tumors (i.e. C00-C979 plus D0-D489, hereinafter cancer macro-type CD). Lower 90% confidence interval of 10-year average values were computed according to the Byar method