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Incidence of other cancer diagnoses in women with breast cancer: a retrospective cohort study with 42,248 women

  • Epidemiology
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Breast Cancer Research and Treatment Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of the present study was to determine whether women diagnosed with breast cancer (BC) have an increased incidence of other cancers, e.g., gastric cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, and so on, compared to healthy women without a breast cancer diagnosis.

Methods

This retrospective cohort study was based on data from the Disease Analyzer database (IQVIA) and included adult women with an initial diagnosis of BC documented in one of 1,274 general practices in Germany between January 2000 and December 2018. Women with BC were matched to women without cancer by age, index year, yearly consultation frequency, and co-diagnoses. Univariate Cox regression models were used to study the association between BC and the incidence of other cancer diagnoses.

Results

21,124 women with BC and 21,124 women (mean age: 63 years) without cancer were included. Within 10 years of the index date, 14.3% of women with BC and 10.0% of women without cancer were diagnosed with cancer (p < 0.001). BC was significantly associated with the incidence of other cancer diagnoses (HR: 1.42, p < 0.001). The strongest association was observed for respiratory organ cancer (HR = 1.69, p < 0.001), followed by female genital organ cancer (HR = 1.61, p < 0.001) and cancer of lymphoid and hematopoietic tissue (HR: 1.59, p < 0.001).

Conclusion

The results of this study show that women with BC have an increased incidence of another cancer compared to women without cancer. Therefore, it is important to pay particular attention to the development of other malignancies during follow-up in patients with BC. This should be considered especially in patients with a proven genetic mutation.

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Data availability

The datasets analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to data protection rules but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Gynecology, Herz Jesu Klinik, Fulda, Germany

    Ivan Nikolov

  2. Epidemiology, IQVIA, Unterschweinstiege 2–14, 60549, Frankfurt, Germany

    Karel Kostev

  3. Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany

    Matthias Kalder

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  1. Ivan Nikolov
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  2. Karel Kostev
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  3. Matthias Kalder
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Analyses were performed by IN and KK. The first draft of the manuscript was written by IN and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Karel Kostev.

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Conflict of interest

The authors have not disclosed any competing interests.

Ethical approval

The database used includes only anonymized data in compliance with the regulations of the applicable data protection laws. German law allows the use of anonymous electronic medical records for research purposes under certain conditions. According to this legislation, it is not necessary to obtain informed consent from patients or approval from a medical ethics committee for this type of observational study that contains no directly identifiable data. Because patients were only queried as aggregates and no protected health information was available for queries, no Institutional Review Board approval was required for the use of this database or the completion of this study.

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Nikolov, I., Kostev, K. & Kalder, M. Incidence of other cancer diagnoses in women with breast cancer: a retrospective cohort study with 42,248 women. Breast Cancer Res Treat 195, 75–82 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10549-022-06666-5

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