Abstract
Background: Breast cancer screening utilization varies across immigrant and non-immigrant populations. Recent studies have also suggested that some immigrant populations in Canada present with a higher frequency of later-stage breast cancer compared to non-immigrants. Our study aimed to augment prior research by presenting breast cancer stage distributions and stage-specific breast cancer incidence rates for immigrant and non-immigrants in British Columbia, Canada. Methods: We utilized a population-based cohort of more than 1.3 million women built from linked administrative health and immigration data sets. Age-standardized incidence rate ratios were generated to compare immigrant and non-immigrant groups. Poisson regression was used to assess the relative frequency of later stage diagnosis among immigrant groups compared to non-immigrants. Results: Indian and Chinese immigrants both showed significantly lower stage I and stage II-IV incidence rates compared to non-immigrants. However, Indian immigrants showed a higher frequency of later stage tumours at diagnosis compared to non-immigrants, while in contrast Chinese immigrants showed a lower frequency of later stage tumours. Filipino immigrants showed similar stage-specific rates and stage at diagnosis compared to non-immigrants. Conclusions: Our findings highlight a need for continued surveillance of cancer among immigrant and non-immigrant populations and inquiry into reasons for differences in stage at diagnosis across groups.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all of the Data Stewards who approved access to data to complete this study. We would further like to thank the staff at Population Data BC for assistance in facilitating the application process for access to study data. All inferences, opinions, and conclusions drawn in this manuscript are those of the authors, and do not reflect the opinions or policies of the Data Steward(s). We are grateful for financial support from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the University of British Columbia.
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Woods, R.R., Kliewer, E.V., McGrail, K.M. et al. Stage-Specific Risk of Breast Cancer among Canadian Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Women. J Immigrant Minority Health 25, 232–236 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-022-01378-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-022-01378-w