Age-standardized mortality-to-incidence ratio for thyroid cancer in the world.

Mortality-to-Incidence ratio (MIR) is one of several indicators that are used to inform about cancer patients’ prognosis. The International Agency for Research on Cancer produces GLOBOCAN estimates of cancer incidence and mortality in 185 countries. Age-standardized MIRs presented here were extracted from the ‘Global Cancer Observatory’ website [1]. On this website, the age-adjusted MIRs were calculated by dividing the estimated age-adjusted mortality rate in 2022 by the age-adjusted incidence rate in 2022. Although the numerator and denominator of the MIR are actually based on different cohorts of patients, this indicator is useful to crudely assess the burden of a specific cancer by giving a measure of its associated mortality while accounting for its incidence. It is therefore interesting to compare cancer sites, or for a given cancer site, across different countries or periods of time: a higher value indicates a greater contribution to death from the disease (worse prognosis) while a lower value indicates a smaller contribution to death from the disease (better prognosis). However, it should be emphasized that the MIR cannot be interpreted directly as a measure of survival at a given time after cancer diagnosis. To compare the estimated MIRs for thyroid cancer among six regions (Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern America, Oceania, and Asia), we plotted the age-adjusted MIRs by countries and combined regions in Fig. 1.