Associations between sexual orientation and overall and site-specific diagnosis of cancer: Evidence from two national patient surveys in England

Abstract

Purpose To address gaps in evidence on the risk of cancer in people from sexual minorities. Patients and Methods Weused data from 796,594 population-based English General Practice Patient Survey responders to explore the prevalence of self-reported diagnoses of cancer in the last 5 years among sexual minorities compared with heterosexual women and men. We analyzed data from 249,010 hospitalbased English Cancer Patient Experience Survey responders with sexual orientation as a binary outcome, and International Classification of Diseases, Tenth, Revision, diagnosis as covariate - 38 different common and rarer cancers, with breast and prostate cancer as baseline categories for women and men, respectively - to examine whether people from sexual minorities are over- or under-represented among different cancer sites. For both analyses, we used logistic regression, stratified by sex and adjusted for age. Results A diagnosis of cancer in the past 5 years was more commonly reported by male General Practice Patient Survey responders who endorsed gay or bisexual orientation compared with heterosexual men (odds ratio [OR], 1.31; 95% CI, 1.15 to 1.49; P