Mongolia has a high burden of non-communicable diseases, and cancer – after cardiovascular disease – is the second leading cause of mortality in the country, according to the United Nations Interagency Task Force on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases.
“Cancer accounts for more than a quarter of all deaths,” explains Uranchimeg Tsegmid, Head of Non-Surgical Oncology at the National Cancer Centre (NCC), a busy hospital in Ulaanbaatar, which receives thousands of patients from across Mongolia seeking diagnosis and treatment. In 2020 alone, health officials in Mongolia reported more than 5,700 new cases of cancer, of which nearly 2,700 were diagnosed in women.
For women in Mongolia, the International Agency for Research on Cancer reports that cervical and breast cancers are among the four most common cancers, the other two being liver and stomach cancers. In 2020, the country reported 334 new cervical cancer cases and lost 1,943 women to the cancer, in total.
Since 20141/, a series of complementary IAEA technical cooperation (TC) projects, have been implemented to help expand the scope and scale of the National Cancer Centre’s services and to enhance their accuracy and quality. Now, with the commissioning of a new treatment planning system (TPS) in 2021 and the introduction of advanced cancer treatment modalities in the last two years, hopes are high that cervical, breast and other common women’s cancers will be diagnosed at earlier stages and treated with greater effectiveness, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
As part of an ongoing TC project, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and radiation technicians operating modern linear accelerators installed in the Radiation Oncology Department of the National Cancer Center of Mongolia have been trained at Giessen-Marburg University Hospital in Germany, Hiroshima University Hospital in Japan, and at the Korea Institute of Radiological & Medical Sciences (KIRAMS) in Seoul.
As a result, in 2018 CT-based 3D brachytherapy was officially introduced to provide effective radiation treatment to cervical cancer sites, with minimal side effects for normal, healthy organs and tissue. Since then, over 200 cervical cancer patients in the country have been able to receive brachytherapy per year.
The IAEA provided expert guidance and training to facilitate the introduction of 3D conformal radiotherapy (3DCRT), an advanced treatment method that allows clinicians to shape radiation beams to match the shape of the tumour. “The first 3DCRT procedure was delivered in June 2019,” said Dr Tsegmid, “and currently, more than 98 per cent of all patients can undergo and benefit from 3DCRT.”
