Favorable liver cancer mortality-to-incidence ratios of countries with high health expenditure.

OBJECTIVE: Health expenditure is a marker associated with an advanced healthcare system, which contributes toward the good prognosis of patients. Mortality-to-incidence ratios (MIRs) are one of the predictors that reflect the prognosis of cancer patients. There remains some uncertainty on the correlation of MIRs of liver cancer with the health expenditure of countries.

METHODS: We therefore analyzed the correlation of MIRs from the GLOBOCAN 2012 database with the WHO rankings and the total expenditures on health/gross domestic product from WHO by linear regression analyses. A total of 29 countries were selected in this study according to the data quality and the incidence number.

RESULTS: The results showed high rates of incidence/mortality and MIRs in less developed regions (0.92 vs. 0.96 for more vs. less developed regions). Among the continents, Asia has the highest incidence/mortality in case number, crude rate, and age-standardized rate. In terms of the MIR, Northern America has the lowest MIR and Latin America and the Caribbean have the highest MIRs (0.82 and 1.04, respectively). Finally, favorable MIRs are associated significantly with good WHO ranking and high expenditures on gross domestic product (P=0.048 and 0.025, respectively).

CONCLUSION: The MIR variation for liver cancer is thus found to be associated with the health expenditure and WHO ranking.