Impact of socioeconomic inequalities on geographic disparities in cancer incidence: comparison of methods for spatial disease mapping

摘要

BackgroundThe reliability of spatial statistics is often put into question because real spatial variations may not be found, especially in heterogeneous areas. Our objective was to compare empirically different cluster detection methods. We assessed their ability to find spatial clusters of cancer cases and evaluated the impact of the socioeconomic status (e.g., the Townsend index) on cancer incidence.