Stage, treatment and outcomes for patients with breast cancer in British Columbia in 2002: a population-based cohort study

Abstract

A lthough the 5-year overall survival rate for patients with breast cancer in the United States rose from 75% in the late 1970s to 90% by 2006, this disease remains the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women. 1 Many factors potentially contributing to these improvements in survival include the availability of breast screening 2–4 and the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of can-cer care; the availability of appropriate surgery, radiotherapy 5–7 and systemic therapy; 8,9 and various health system factors. 10–12 British Columbia has a publicly funded cancer care system. The Screening Mammography Program of BC currently screens approximately 50% of its target population 13,14 at no charge to the patient. The province also has a centralized organized cancer care program through the BC Cancer Agency, which provides all radiotherapy, chemotherapy and hormone therapy that is prescribed in the province, also at no charge to the patient. For the province as a whole, the rate of referral for patients with breast cancer to a BC Cancer Agency centre was 85% throughout the 2000s. 15 For many decades, the BC Cancer Agency has developed treatment guidelines and disseminated them to all physicians in the province. BC data have been used in international stud-ies assessing prognostic information and to validate prognos-tic models used in clinics internationally, 16 but there has been no comprehensive study of outcomes and treatment rates in the province. The objective of this cohort study was to describe patient characteristics, stage distribution, stage-specific treatment uti-lization and outcomes for all patients in whom breast cancer was diagnosed in British Columbia in 2002. Background: There are very few long-term Canadian data on breast cancer outcomes by stage. We described the stage, treatment and outcomes of breast cancer at a population level for patients in British Columbia.