MONDAY, Jan. 16, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- Older women with breast cancer are more likely to die than younger women with the disease, a new Swedish study finds.
Researchers at the University of Uppsala tracked the five-year health outcomes of more than 9,000 breast cancer patients.
They found that those aged 70 to 84 years had up to a 13 percent lower chance of surviving breast cancer than those aged 50 to 69 years.
Differences in diagnosis and treatment, rather than the presence of other illnesses, are the reason for this disparity in survival rates, the researchers said.
Breast cancer diagnosis was often made later in older women and, once diagnosed, they were less likely to be fully investigated for their cancer and had less aggressive treatment than younger women, the study said.
Older women had larger tumors at the time of diagnosis and were less likely to have their cancer detected by mammography screening and to have the stage of disease identified. The older women also had fewer lymph nodes examined and had radiotherapy and chemotherapy less often than younger breast cancer patients, the study said.
The study also found that older patients were less likely to be offered breast-conserving surgery, but more likely to receive hormone treatment, such as tamoxifen, even if their tumors did not show signs of hormone sensitivity.
The study appears in the journal PLoS Medicine.
More information
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more about breast cancer in seniors.
