Abstract :
Risk management is one of the important and effective approaches to disease control. This
strategy is not well recognized by public health managers throughout the world, and only
some of the countries and institutions using a standardized approach to determine the risk
factors and managing them.
The term "hazard" refers to a potential cause of illness or injury, but "risk" expresses
probability that some specified adverse outcomes will occur in a person or a group exposed
to a particular concentration of a hazardous agent over specific time. In the study of 146
breast tumor cases intervals, the burden of cancer does not fall equally on all members of a
society; some of them are much more likely to develop cancer than others because of amount
and time of exposure to risk factors and genetic response. For risk management, it may be
important to distinguish between two exposures that may entail the same "lifetime risk" but
that induce death at different ages. For this purpose, predictions of "years of life lost",
defined as the difference in life expectancy between an unexposed person and one exposed
at a certain age, may be derived. In practice, the terms "exposure" and "dose" are often used
interchangeably in quantitative estimation and prediction (QEP) as two important elements in
cancer risk management. Cancer is a substantial public health problem for many developing
countries, and is likely to become more important in the future as populations age and
industrialization proceeds (Tomatis, 1991 and Rastgoy 2002).In countries with fewer resources
than those that the developed countries currently possess, cost-effective programs to control
cancer are specially important, and finding out the risk factors of cancers and estimation of
their weight to prioritize the activities for cancer control program is mandatory. Here in Iran
the cancer risk factors are well-known as other countries but those are not quantitative estimated and predicted, so the policy makers and public health managers are not able to
work on risk factors for cancer control. Cancer Research Center as a responsible institute is
working on cancer risk factors and quantitative estimation to introduce the main route for
controlling them. Hopefully these activities will be effective and acceptable for the responsible
parties. We will share our research results here in IJCP or other international documents as the
first regional experience in cancer risk management in the future.
