Association between Gastric Cancer Mortality-to-Incidence Ratio and Human Development Index: Evidence from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Gastric cancer has been one of the major causes of death in the past decades. It is the fifth most prevalent cancer and the third leading cause of neoplasm death worldwide. Thus, to know more about this health problem, assessing the burden of this cancer and its association with socioeconomic status of countries is of great importance. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the mean trend of gastric cancer mortality-to-incidence ratio (GCMIR) in different super regions defined by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and investigate the relationship between GCMIR and Human Development Index (HDI) in the period 2000-2016.

We used the data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2016 study to calculate GCMIR for 185 world countries in the period 2000–2016. We also extracted the HDI data for each year under study from the Updates of the UNDP website. To attain the analytic aims, marginal modeling and generalized estimating equations (GEE) were utilized.

Sub-Saharan Africa was the only super region with a positive slope of GCMIR, and high-income countries had the greatest decreasing slope of GCMIR during the study period. Moreover, there was a negative association between GCMIR and HDI in these years.

Our findings revealed that gastric cancer could be thought not only as a biological disease but also as a social event that will be more controllable with the improvement of economic status and other social determinants of health.