The quality of input data determines the reliability of epidemiological assessments.
Thus, the verification of cases reported to the National Cancer Registry is required.
The objective of our study was evaluating the reliability of cases diagnosed by lung
cancer, exploring the patterns of erroneous reports. The validation of the 11,750
lung cancer cases reported to the Cancer Registry in 2018 was performed with the involvement
of the recording hospitals, analyzing the characteristics of reports by gender, age
and attributes of the reporting institutions. 81.3 percent of the reported cases was
confirmed, in 40.4 percent of the false reports, malignancy was not present at all.
Among the erroneous cases women and the elderly age group were overrepresented. The
highest deleted rate occurred in Borsod- Abaúj-Zemplén county. As a conclusion, there
is a strong need for the improvement of the efficiency in encoding lung cancer. The
most common errors: confusion of malignant-benign, cancerous-non-cancerous and primary-metastatic
lesions. The reliability is not affected by the role of individual institutions in
the hierarchy of health care. The availability of reliable epidemiological data is
crucial in the fight against cancer, which requires broad professional cooperation.
