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Iran's health ministry. It runs public health care and medical education through the country's universities of medical sciences, which run the national cancer registry, and it runs the free early detection programmes for bowel and breast cancer.
The Ministry of Health and Medical Education combines Iran's health ministry with its medical schools: care, public health and training are delivered through universities of medical sciences in each province. Its own website lists among its deputy ministries one for food and medicines, and among its affiliated organisations the Iran Health Insurance Organization.
Cancer counting sits with it. A 2024 analysis of the 2016 data describes the Iranian National Population-based Cancer Registry as managed by all 60 medical universities under the ministry, covering 31 provinces and following the standard protocols of the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the International Association of Cancer Registries, with pathology reports and hospital clinical data as sources; the 2014 report says it covered 30 of 31 provinces, 98% of the population.
In a ministry news item dated 22 Shahrivar 1402 (13 September 2023), read in Persian from an Internet Archive copy, the director-general of the ministry's office for non-communicable disease management, Dr Kourosh Etemad, said that early detection programmes for the two common cancers, colorectal and breast, are carried out free of charge across the whole country, with a simple first test for bowel cancer offered at comprehensive health service centres to attendees over 40 and positive results referred to hospitals. The ministry's own site did not answer from here on 4 November 2026.
The most recent full national incidence report from the registry that OnCo could read in full. It shows prostate cancer overtaking stomach cancer in men since 2014 and a large number of non-melanoma skin cancers, which change totals depending on whether they are counted.
A national screening programme exists and runs through primary care, but coverage was low and the paper calls for colonoscopy capacity to be prepared before screening expands.
With the International Agency for Research on Cancer's 2020 classification of opium consumption as carcinogenic to humans, it makes opium a cancer-prevention target in Iran alongside tobacco.
It is the first published national count from the population-based registry. It places Iran as a medium-risk country with a different order of common cancers from the world average.
Shares Iran Food and Drug Administration (IFDA), Cancer Institute of Iran, Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex.
Shares Cancer registries and population surveillance, Oesophageal cancer, Gastric & gastro-oesophageal junction cancer, Colorectal cancer.
Shares Cancer registries and population surveillance, Gastric & gastro-oesophageal junction cancer, Colorectal cancer.
Shares Colorectal cancer screening (colonoscopy, FIT, stool DNA, blood), Breast cancer (all types), Colorectal cancer.
Shares Colorectal cancer screening (colonoscopy, FIT, stool DNA, blood), Breast cancer (all types), Colorectal cancer.
Shares Colorectal cancer screening (colonoscopy, FIT, stool DNA, blood), Breast cancer (all types), Colorectal cancer.
Shares Cancer registries and population surveillance, Breast cancer (all types).
Shares Colorectal cancer screening (colonoscopy, FIT, stool DNA, blood), Breast cancer (all types), Colorectal cancer.
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