TUESDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) -- Hodgkin disease survival may differ between Europe and the United States due to regional variations in the disease types, according to a report in the July 15 issue of Cancer.
Claudia Allemani, Ph.D., of the Istituto Nazionale per lo Studio e la Cura dei Tumori in Milan, Italy, and colleagues compared data on 6,726 Hodgkin disease patients in 37 European cancer registries with 3,442 patients from nine U.S. registries, who were all diagnosed between 1990 and 1994.
Compared with U.S. patients, Europeans in Eurocare West, a cancer registry that includes France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Iceland and Malta, had a relative excess death risk of 0.93, while those in Eurocare UK, which includes some areas of Great Britain, had a relative excess death risk of 1.15 and those in Eurocare East, which includes parts of Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia, had an excess risk of 1.39. However, the difference between the U.S. and the U.K. disappeared when morphology was taken into account. Hodgkin disease types varied less in the United States than Europe, and 61.7 percent of U.S. cases involved nodular sclerosis, versus 45.9 percent in Europe.
"The current results provide population-based evidence that morphology strongly influences the prognosis of patients with Hodgkin disease," the authors write. "However, differences in the morphologic case mix explains only some of the geographic variations observed in survival."
Abstract
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