Older women with breast cancer face a greater risk of succumbing to the disease than younger women, according to a Dutch study published today.
Around 40 per cent of patients are 65 years or older at diagnosis. Dr Willemien van de Water of the Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, and colleagues, looked at whether age is a stand-alone risk factor.
They investigated the possible link among 9,766 postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. Over about five years, 1,043 of the women died.
Compared with patients younger than 65 years risk of death due to the cancer increased with age, from 5.7 per cent in patients younger than 65, to 8.3 per cent in patients 75 or older. Risk of relapse also increased with age.
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the authors conclude that increasing age was associated with increased death rates from the disease.
They add that: "Because breast cancer incidence increases with increasing age, changing demographics and continuously increasing life expectancy will further enlarge the number of older women confronted with breast cancer."
However, the experts point out that the older women in the study may have been undertreated, missing out on vital chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
"In conclusion, regardless of a higher risk of other-cause mortality and independent of tumour and treatment characteristics, disease-specific mortality increases with age," they write.
They call for more age-specific breast cancer studies in order to improve outcomes in patients of all ages. Further studies may also uncover the reasons for this higher disease-specific mortality with increasing age, they add.
Association Between Age at Diagnosis and Disease-Specific Mortality Among Postmenopausal Women With Hormone Receptor-Positive Breast Cancer. van de Water, W. et al. The Journal of the American Medical Association February 8 2012 Volume 307 Number 6 pp. 590-97.
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