Animal cancer registries need common quality standards to support One Health

Animal cancer registries are gaining importance in veterinary oncology, comparative medicine and One Health, but their epidemiological value depends on the quality and comparability of the data they collect. A new Italian study proposes a structured framework to assess that quality and tests it on the Animal Cancer Registry of Abruzzo.

The study identifies 16 quality indicators grouped into six domains: registry organisation, case sources, comparability, validity, timeliness and completeness.

Why registry quality matters

Animal cancer registries can help measure incidence, detect spatial or temporal trends and support comparisons between animal and human populations. Companion animals are especially relevant because they share environments and exposures with people and may act as sentinels for environmental risks.

But registries differ widely in case definitions, diagnostic confirmation, coding systems and reporting methods. Without common standards, apparent differences in cancer frequency may reflect surveillance methods rather than true epidemiological variation.

The authors therefore adapt principles long used in human cancer registration to veterinary surveillance!

Abruzzo as a test case

The framework was applied to the Animal Cancer Registry of Abruzzo, established in 2014 and managed through the regional veterinary public-health system.

The analysis focused on dogs and covered 2020–2024. All 16 indicators could be calculated from routinely collected data, suggesting that the proposed framework can be implemented without creating a completely new surveillance system.

Dogs are particularly useful for population-based surveillance in Italy because mandatory microchipping allows individual identification and reduces the risk of duplicate records.

Passive surveillance remains a weakness

The Abruzzo registry is mainly pathology-based and depends on veterinarians submitting tumour samples. That introduces an important limitation: cancers may be missed when animals are not examined, owners decline diagnostics, tumours are treated without histopathology or samples are processed outside the network.

For this reason, a large number of registered cases does not automatically mean that a registry is complete. The study argues that completeness, timeliness and diagnostic validity should therefore be assessed explicitly rather than assumed.

A One Health tool if the data are reliable

Animal cancer registries could eventually contribute to environmental health surveillance by identifying unusual cancer patterns in populations sharing the same environments as humans. But that requires standardised coding, consistent case definitions and transparent quality assessment.

The proposed framework is not yet an international standard, and the authors stress that it must now be tested across other registries and species.

Veterinary cancer surveillance has to move from simply collecting cases to evaluating whether those data are robust enough for comparative oncology and One Health research.