Breast Cancer Patients with Young Children Less Likely to Use Radiotherapy

Breast cancer can drastically impact a person's life. After breast conserving surgery (BCS), though, radiotherapy (RT) can greatly reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence. Yet while younger women tend to have more aggressive tumors and have higher risks of recurrence than older breast cancer patients, they are less likely to receive RT. Now, scientists have taken a closer look as to why that is in order to find out ways to encourage women to take this particular treatment.

In order to compare RT utilization by women over different ages, family structures and regions of residence, the researchers used a nationwide database to review medical and prescription records of 21,008 patients with insurance coverage who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer and who received BCS between January 2004 and December 2009. The scientists excluded patients with a prior history of breast cancer, RT before BCS, mastectomy within 12 months of BCS and distant metastasis.

So what did they find? The scientists discovered that patients 50 years or younger were less likely to receive RT than those in older age brackets. Why? It turns out that a woman was less likely to receive RT if she had at least one child less than seven years old, compared with a woman who had no or older children. While other factors such as insurance type could also be a potential barrier to receiving RT at any age, the association between young children and the lower use of RT was statistically significant only for women between the ages of 20 to 50 years.

The findings reveal exactly why these women decide to not undergo RT. More specifically, they may help researchers encourage the use of RT in order to improve the quality of cancer care. However, additional work is needed to develop more robust interventions tailored to the needs of younger cancer patients.

The findings are published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.