Cancer research priorities for early diagnosis in Iran: Analyses based on Multiple-Attribute Decision Making Model

National comprehensive cancer control programs combat cancer through different measures, including primary prevention, early detection, treatment, and palliative and supportive care. Among the others, early detection programs seem to be a promising intervention and lead to lower cancer mortality. We define research priorities for the early detection of cancers in Iran.

We applied the multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) tools using three key attributes, including “5-year prevalence”, “mortality to incidence ration as severity of disease,” and “economic burden,” to rank different cancers for research priorities. The priorities were ranked based on four scenarios based on the weighting of the attributes. We also used the differences in the 5-year survival between localized and advanced tumors as the effect of early detection and incorporated it as the decision rule into the priority-setting model.

Gastric cancer and cancers of the brain and nervous system ranked first in all the proposed scenarios. The most and least 5-year survival differences between localized and advanced cancers were observed for the kidney (80.5%) and the brain (3.3%) cancers. The top 10 priorities for early cancer detection in Iran were gastric, prostate, breast, lung, colorectal, ovarian, kidney, bladder, and cervical cancers.

We used a quantitative method and demonstrated the priority areas for research in the early detection of cancer in Iran. Researchers and government may use these results to optimize their research strategies for cancer prevention in Iran.