Coming of age : treatment and outcomes in older patients with breast cancer

Abstract

As

a result of our ageing population, breast cancer is becoming a disease of the

elderly. Unfortunately, most studies investigating the efficacy of treatment do

not include older patients and are not representative for the older population. In this thesis, we investigated whether there is variation in treatment and survival among older women with breast cancer in five European countries. Moreover, we study the long term efficacy of two types of adjuvant endocrine therapy in postmenopausal women. In addition, the effect of age and comorbidities on breast cancer death in the presence of competing mortality is studied. Finally, we investigate whether other endpoints in clinical studies might be more relevant for the older population and we introduce a new endpoint for clinical research in the older population with cancer.