Análise da produção científica brasileira em Oncologia: um estudo comparativo entre artigos na base Lattes e os registros hospitalares de câncer

Abstract

The disordered reproduction of cells can lead to the development of cancer, a disease first mentioned by Hippocrates who noted the similarity between the ramifications of a breast tumor and the legs of a crab. Cancer cases are set up by the Hospital Cancer Registries (HCR) based on information sent to them by the oncology care network (hospitals, laboratories and imaging centers) and later sent to the Instituto Nacional do Câncer (INCA), a Federal Government agency linked to the Ministry of Health and responsible for preparing estimates of disease growth in the country. Researchers who use Base Lattes to register their academic productions, feed their curriculum with information about articles of their own or coauthorship, published in the country and abroad. This study aimed to quantify the cases of cancer that occurred in Brazil from 2001 to 2018, sent to INCA by the HCR, categorizing them by morphology and topography, as well as the articles registered in the Lattes Base in the same period, using the same categories. In the process of preparing data from the RHC Base, the codes that identify the topographies and morphologies in the International Classification of Diseases - Oncology, version 3 (ICD/O3) were used to obtain the description of the primary tumor location and the type of tumor that caused the disease. The articles registered at Base Lattes were obtained through scriptLattes, an open-source computer program that accesses Base Lattes and extracts the complete information from researchers' curriculum, informed in its parameters file. 3,171,875 cases of cancer were obtained from the RHC Base and 22,554 articles from the Lattes Base. The titles of the articles were analyzed, seeking to identify the existence of descriptions of topographies and / or morphologies that would allow to relate the article as being about cancer and categorizing according to the mentioned topography and morphology. It was observed in the tabulation of cancer cases that there is a significant delay in sending information about people with cancer to the RHC in the last five years, which makes it difficult to make estimates with more recent data and may cause distortions in the analysis of these data. It was concluded that among the ten topographies with the highest occurrence in the RHC Base, six are among those with the highest number of articles published and registered in the Base Lattes, and that the topography with the highest number of occurrences among cancer cases (breast), also it is the one with the largest number of articles published in the sample of this research; whereas among the ten morphologies with the highest number of cancer cases found in the RHC Base analyzed, six are among the ten main morphologies found in articles published and registered in the sample of Base Lattes, and that the main morphology found in Base RHC (Carcinoma), it is also the main morphology studied in the articles of the analyzed samples, indicating that cancer research carried out between 2001 and 2018 in the country focused on the main types of cancer that occur in the Brazilian population. This study pointed out that, although Carcinoma is the biggest offender among cancer cases (1,856,311) and the morphology with the largest number of articles (3,844), the relationship of interest between them is only 0.21%, indicating that it is not the morphology of greatest interest to researchers, a privilege that belongs to Lymphoma with only 14,023 cases of cancer, but for which 862 articles were produced and published, in a 6.15% interest ratio. The analyzes produced from Base Lattes showed that Blastoma is the tumor of greatest interest to researchers, since 115 articles were found against 36 cases of cancer, in an interest ratio of 319.44%, pointing out that the lower the number of cancer cases of a given morphology, the greater the interest of the scientific community in its study.