Background:
The first national figures for the National Cancer Registry (NCR) were for the patients diagnosed in 2003. Since then, timeliness of NCR was fluctuating due to restructuration of the NCR, staff turn-over, armed conflicts, pandemics, multifaceted crisis of the past years.
The 2023-2028 cancer plan included to reach the needed timeliness for the NCR. Timeliness is defined as generating the figures within 24 months after diagnosis.
 
Objectives:
The main objective is to be able to generate the 2024 NCR figures on time, and to monitor national trends and provide information for better cancer control.
 
Methods:
The target tumors are the malignant ones, in addition to the benign ones of central nervous system.
The data sources include public and private hospitals and laboratories. Focal persons are appointed by the facility to coordinate detection and reporting to the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH).
Data is collected with any available format, paper or electronic, free text or coded, in various languages (Arabic, French, and English). Later data is coded by team of coders using ICD-O-3. Audit on coding is done by senior staff. Then data is either entered case by case or imported into Canreg5. Data cleaning is conducted to retrieve duplicates using python/R script to identify potential duplicates that are later manually validated. In addition, abnormal associations are searched and corrected.
The population estimates are selected from the UNPD database with 5-year interval. 
Once cleaned, standard descriptive tables are automatically generated as HTML tables. Tables are posted on the MOPH website for dissemination.
 
Results:
By mid-January 2026, the 2024 NCR figures were generated. In the following, the non-melanoma skin cancers were excluded.
For 2024, there were 16,226 new patients diagnosed with cancer. The crude incidence rate per 100,000 reached 252.4 [246.5-258.3] for males, 258.3 [299.5-293.3] for females, and 276.6 [272.3-280.9] for both.
The age-standardized incidence rates per 100,000 were 212.8 [210.1-215.3] for males and 240.4 [237.9-243.1] for females, and 226.6 [222.9-230.3] for both.
The top 10 sites for males were: prostate, bladder, trachea/lung, colo-rectum, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, kidney, multiple myeloma, stomach, pancreas and central nervous system.
The top 10 sites for females were: breast, colo-rectum, trachea/lung, thyroid, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, ovary, corpus uteri, bladder, multiple myeloma and myeloid leukemia.
The annual trends for the cases count and incidence show a return to the trends before the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, a decrease of the cases count and incidence was observed in 2020-2022.
 
Conclusion:
The timeliness relies on fighting the high turn over of the NCR staff. It is crucial to involving and train more staff on data collection, data coding, data entry/importation, data cleaning and analysis, even as part time tasks. This request conducting formal training and continuous training of the staff with internal audit on performance.
Other means contributes to the timeliness as training focal persons at health facilities, adoption of national health identifier, adoption of unified national metadata in the health information system, and exploring use of artificial intelligence for medical coding.

Lebanon NCR incident cases (nb) by year