After an Increasing Trend, Breast Cancer Cases in Spain Decrease Significantly Starting with 2001

A recent research released in the October edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute presents a positive outcome of screening patients suffering from breast cancer in Spain. Even if in the 1980s and 1990s the number of women developing breast cancer was increasing, after an enhanced screening period, beginning with the year 2001, this incidence rates dropped down.

Senior investigator was medical doctor Marina Pollán from the Nacional de Epidemiología within Instituto de Salud Carlos III located in Madrid. Her team of scientists studied the Spanish cancer registries ranging between 1980 and 2004. The investigators observed aggressive, metastasizing breast cancer tumors in the women population which were recorded in the registry. They choose to use this because the records were written down for almost ten consecutive years. The observers took a closer look at the period in which the cancer screening began in Spain and was available for the whole women population and the year in which this process managed to register its highest peak in the breast cancer suffering population coverage.

The team of researchers discovered that during the 1980s and the 1990s the number of people developing breast cancer grew by 2.9% per year. However, starting with the year 2001 an important diminish in this growing trend appeared, and the probability of developing breast malign tumors dropped down by 3 percents. The overall statistics of the Spanish cancer registries stated that it had been observed a constant, yet little, increase in the number of females who were younger than 45 years and developed breast cancer, a sudden drop down in the year 2001 in the cases of females who were 45 and 46 years old and a gradual decrease of the incidence rate in the cases of women who were older of 65 years of age in the year 1995.

As the investigators state, this abrupt decrease in the number of women developing breast cancer tumors is thought to be the outcome of the screening processes available for all the population. However, at the moment when the screening methods are introduced the number of patients who suffer from cancer is prone to increase due to the fact that the disease is discovered at early development stages rather than when they are already advanced or aggressive. Nonetheless, this slight increase lasts for a short time span.

As the team of investigators explains, at the moment when the screening process is released on the medical market and it also enjoys a full coverage over the cancer suffering population, the number of patients developing malign tumors shows a decreasing trend due to the fact that the number of people who are prone to develop cancer but did not have the means to be diagnosed with this disease had been diminished.

The authors of this research also stated that the variation in the cancer incidence trend in Spain took place in the year 2001, but it seems that it is an outcome of the transformations which take place over geographic regions and age groups in various moments in time.