A nation’s human devpt index points to its cancer types

Mumbai: A country's human development index (HDI) is a potential indicator of its cancer charts. In a country with a very high HDI, for instance, people are more likely to suffer from breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer. The experience in countries such as Germany, Norway and Japan bears this out, with a low-fibre diet largely to blame for the high number of colorectal cancer cases there.      India, which ranks a lowly 134 in the HDI list of 187 countries, has a high incidence of cervical and oral cancer, both associated with poor hygiene and health habits. A study by the International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) showed that 40% of cancer cases occurred in countries with very high HDI despite they being home to just 15% of the world's population.      But on Monday, IARC chief Christopher Wild spelt out a scary prediction at Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel: the cancer incidence in the next 20 years is likely to spike in countries with low to medium HDI. The IARC team was in TMH to inaugurate the IARC's first hub outside its Lyons HQ in France.Oral cancer India's biggest killer, lung cancer China's      The IACR team, which inaugurated its hub at Tata Memorial Hospital on Monday, said increasing living standards in the coming decades in lower-HDI countries could lead to a decrease in the burden of some infection-related cancers, but could increase certain types of cancer currently found in mainly higher-HDI countries. The changing profile of cancer in India's urban areas—where breast cancer caused by lifestyle modifications is overtaking cervical cancer caused by viral infection—is apointer to this trend.      It is to get a clearer picture of the cancer epidemic sweeping across Asia that IARC (an agency that works under the United Nations banner and grades carcinogenic substances in the environment among other tasks) inaugurated the first of its regional hubs in Asia.      The regional hub, set up in TMH, will capture this changing face of cancer in various regions of the world. "Cancer control programmes need to bedevised based on disease patterns in local areas,'' said Dr Wild. Cancer statistics underline the need for local information. IARC data shows that 93 of every 1 lakh Indians suffer from cancer. The equation worsens as one travels east towards China; 211 in every lakh Chinese battles cancer. In Japan, 248 among every lakh population are hit by the disease. But these numbers tell only half the story. Only a closer look reveals that lung cancer is the biggest bane of China, while oral cancer is the giant slayer in India. Japan records one of the highest incidences of colon cancer in the world.      "Our hospital will not only train health personnel from 31 Asian countries on methods to maintain a cancer registry but also prepare a trend analysis of the disease in Asia,'' said Tata Memorial Hospital's epidemiology department head Dr Rajesh Dikshit.