Introduction:

With the progress achieved by MEEC Joint Registration Project and availability of results from most registries it is becoming a priority now to start using these data for planning and research. Due to confidentiality in patients' information and unavailability of medical records in the registries; research based on registry results could be either:

1. Done in the registries themselves; like monitoring of change in incidence and mortality by site over time. These results could help establishing hypotheses about risk factors and monitoring of different interventions and cancer control progress.

2. Done in collaboration with referring centers; mainly for follow-up and survival analysis. This might necessitate inclusion and abstraction of mare data in medical.  

3. Initiated my registry results and executed by clinicians and scientists in research institutions and universities. The role of the registry is to publicize their results and make them available to this sector and encourage their use in research. This sector includes a majority of clinicians and paramedical personnel and a minority of epidemiologists.

Unfortunately, medical curricula in many countries in the region, both on the undergraduate or postgraduate levels, are deficient in the field of cancer epidemiology and its methodology. Emphasis is mainly on the clinical aspects of the disease. Even for oncologist, this deficiency is a serious obstacle for conduct of epidemiologic research and even for proper understanding of published articles related to cancer. epidemiology.