Patterns of cancer occurrence in different regions of West Bengal--a hospital based study.

The incidence of cancer has been rising steadily in the third world countries including India. The patterns of cancer incidence reflect the racial, cultural and pharmacogenomic diversity within populations and nowhere is this diversity more striking than in the Indian subcontinent. This article shows the diversity in patterns of incidence of major cancers across three medical college hospitals in the state of West Bengal in India. All the data were collected from the period between 2001 and 2005. The results show a striking variation of incidence of major cancers in the urban, semi-urban and rural parts of the same state. Indeed the differences of the patterns are explainable by the cultural and socioeconomic differences within the populations from which the study samples are drawn. This constitutes the largest single hospital based data collected from this part of the world till date and will help in re-evaluation of cancer control programmes promulgated by the health authorities of the region.