Measuring the health status gap for American Indians/Alaska Natives: getting closer to the truth.

Objectives: We compared the historical method of calculating cancer incidence rates with 2 new methods to determine which approach optimally estimates the burden of cancer among the Northwest American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) population.

Methods: The first method replicates the traditional way of calculating race-specific rates, and the 2 new methods use probabilistic record linkages to ascertain cancer cases. We indirectly adjusted all rates to the standard 2000 US population.