Global Trend of Breast Cancer Mortality Rate: A 25-Year Study

Document Type : Research Articles

Authors

1 Department of Administrative Science, Faculty of Shariaty, Tehran Branch, Technical and Vocational University (TVU), Tehran, Iran.

2 Department of Information Studies, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.

3 Proteomics Research Center and Department of Biostatistics, Faculty of paramedical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Background: breast cancer is the most common cause of cancer death for women worldwide. In the past two
decades, published epidemiological reports in different parts of the world show significant increase in breast cancer
mortality rate. The aim of this study was to determine the 25-year trend of breast cancer mortality rate in 7 super regions
defined by the Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Middle East, South
Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia and Oceania, Latin America and Caribbean, Central Europe and Eastern Europe and
Central Asia, High-income. Methods: Our study population consisted of 195 world countries in the IHME pre-defined
seven super regions. The age-standardized mortality rates from 1990 to 2015 were extracted from the IHME site. The
reference life table for calculating mortality rates was constructed based on the lowest estimated age-specific mortality
rates from all locations with populations over 5 million in the 2015 iteration of GBD. To determine the trend of breast
cancer mortality rate, a generalized linear mixed model was fitted separately for each IHME region and super region.
Results: Statistical analysis showed a significant increase for breast cancer mortality rate in all super regions, except
for High-income super region. For total world countries, the mean breast cancer mortality rate was 13.77 per 100,000
in 1990 and the overall slope of mortality rate was 0.7 per 100,000 from 1990 to 2015. The results showed that Latin
America and Caribbean the highest increasing trend of breast cancer mortality rate during the years 1990 to 2015 (1.48
per 100,000). Conclusion: In general, our finding showed a significant increase in breast cancer mortality rate in the
world during the past 25 years, which could be due to increase in incidence and prevalence of this cancer. Low this
increasing trend is an alarm for health policy makers in all countries, especially in developing countries and low-income
regions which experienced sharp slopes of breast cancer mortality rate.

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