What Primary Care Records Reveal About Cancer Signs and Symptoms

Leia em português

In Brazil, approximately 60% of cancer cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage. Early identification is one of the most effective strategies to reverse this trend. Detecting signs and symptoms before formal diagnosis allows treatment to begin in a timely manner, enabling less invasive interventions and higher therapeutic success rates. Primary Health Care (PHC) medical records within the Unified Health System (SUS) contain rich clinical information about these signs, recorded at each consultation over the years. Despite this, this source remains largely underused for that purpose.

This exploratory analysis, conducted in Recife with data from 2016 to 2024, investigated four priority cancer types: breast, cervical, prostate, and colorectal. The results indicate that signs related to these cancers are already recorded by health professionals in PHC records months or years before formal diagnosis. These signs represent a relevant source of clinical information that conventional ICD-10 coding cannot fully capture. One of the central challenges is making them visible and transforming them into qualified, reliable, and actionable information. To this end, Vital Strategies Brasil developed a semantic analysis methodology that processes free-text fields in medical records and systematically identifies these signs.