Chronic Disease Prevention Research in Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and Mongolia - Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and Mongolia cover an immense section of Asia and although relativelysparsely populated the total inhabitants number well in excess of 100 million. Furthermore, there is an increasingtendency for urbanization of the populations, which in many cases are growing. The ethnic make-up is diverse,with various degrees of admixture of Russians to the Turkish, Mongolian and other indigenous peoples of theregion, and there is evidence of major variation in the burden of different cancers among the groups, althoughoesophageal and gastric neoplasias are relatively prevalent in common. Clearly there is a need for cooperationfor cancer and other chronic disease prevention and the presence of Russian as a shared language of science,commerce and industry means that there should be no major communication difficulties. However, collaborativeefforts at present are limited and the research output is low, even in the non-English literature. Here we focuson published work from the individual countries, as assessed by PubMed searches using the country name withcancer, cardiovascular, metabolic syndrome and diabetes as search terms, with an especial focus on epidemiology,environmental carcinogenicity and screening. One major aim is to identify active groups with an interest inparticipation in a regional meeting and collaborative research, so that a coordinated approach to grantingagencies can be made to fund such a collective endeavour.