Background
Breast cancer is the leading cause of mortality among middle-aged women in many developed countries, including Catalonia, a region in the northeast of Spain, where it accounts for a fifth of all female cancer deaths and, on the average, fourteen years of potential life lost per death from this cause [
1].
Causes of death other than breast cancer may influence mortality trends in two ways: 1) by changing the number of women at risk of having breast cancer and, 2) by changing the risk of dying of breast cancer once it has developed. For example, infectious diseases at the beginning of the 20th century reduced the number of women at risk for breast cancer and also competed with breast cancer as a cause of death in women with this disease. Thus, the effect of other causes of death in breast cancer incidence and mortality has changed over time depending on trends in other competing risks.
Rosenberg [
2] used the multi-decrement life table methodology to partition overall mortality into mortality due to breast cancer and mortality due to other causes. In addition, multi-decrement life tables permit assessment of the impact that breast cancer mortality has on overall mortality by birth cohort and age. For instance, in the US, the reduction in overall mortality when removing breast cancer as a cause of death could be as high as 15% at some ages.
Evaluation of the impact of mammography and adjuvant therapy on breast cancer mortality reduction can be done using statistical models, for example those found in several studies sponsored by CISNET [
3]. The modeling process requires information such as the dissemination of mammography and adjuvant treatment programs, diagnostic characteristics of mammography, breast cancer incidence and mortality. Another required input is the competing-cause mortality, taking into account that deaths due to breast cancer occur in the presence of other causes of death, the above-mentioned competing risks.
The aims of the present work are: 1) to assess the impact of breast cancer mortality on overall mortality by birth cohort and age in Catalonia in the 20
th century and 2) to assess the risk of death from other causes than breast cancer in cohorts born from 1900 to 2004. Our analysis is based on Rosenberg's work for the US and is part of a wider project that aims to model the impact of mammography in Catalonia (Spain) based on the methodology developed by Lee and Zelen for the CISNET project [
4].
Discussion and conclusion
Our study shows that breast cancer mortality in Catalonia has experienced important changes over the last century. There was an increasing impact of breast cancer on overall mortality in the first part of the century, with a peak for cohorts born in 1945–54 in the 40–49 age groups (approximately 24% of mortality was due to breast cancer in these age groups and cohorts). This increasing impact could be explained by a decrease in mortality from other causes of death and increased breast cancer incidence and mortality due to changes in lifestyle and reproductive patterns [
13]. In Catalonia, mortality from all causes in women has been decreasing an average of 1.6% per year since 1978 [
14], whereas breast cancer incidence increased 2.2% per year between 1980–97 [
15].
The subsequent decrease in impact was due, primarily, to the observed reduction in mortality from breast cancer during the 1990s, which affected all age groups (see [
16] and official reports by the Catalan Department of Health [
14]). Furthermore, the significant reduction in recent decades implies important gains in life expectancy for middle-aged women [
17]. This reduction has been attributed to the use of mammography and adjuvant treatments in the US [
18]. The phenomenon is now being studied in Catalonia.
In Catalonia, as in the US, breast cancer mortality had the greatest impact on global mortality in the 40–54 age groups during the 20
th century [
2]. On one hand, breast cancer incidence and mortality are low before the age of 40 [
19]. Although breast cancer incidence and mortality increase with age, after age 50 there are other causes of death (competing risks) that are acting simultaneously, and therefore breast cancer may have less impact on overall mortality.
It is worthwhile to note that the values of the ratio
were higher in the US, which means that the impact of breast cancer mortality was lower. The ratio
depends on two risks, the risk of dying of causes other than breast cancer (numerator) and the risk of dying of any cause (denominator). For cohorts of women born in the middle of the 20
th century, overall mortality rates at ages 40 to 54 years were 40% to 60% higher in the US than in Catalonia [
20]. On the other hand, breast cancer mortality rates for these ages and cohorts were similar or slightly higher in Spain than the US. Since breast cancer mortality rates represent about one fifth of the mortality in these age groups, differences in the overall mortality risk in the US and Catalonia may explain the differences seen in the
ratio. But, other factors like reproductive patterns, hormonal replacement therapy use and fat intake could explain differences in the impact of breast cancer mortality in both countries.
Results from Rosenberg show that the lowest
ratio (the highest impact of breast cancer mortality) for women born in 1930 occurs at older ages than for those born in 1950. This pattern is also shown in our data before any extrapolation (Figure
2a). In Catalonia this is related with a clear period effect during the 1990s. As we show in Figures
3 and
4, trends for breast cancer death probabilities by age increased from the 1970s to the 1990s and started a decreasing trend after that for all age groups.
The declines in mortality from breast cancer, which began in Europe in the late 1980s may be attributed in part to earlier detection by screening programs. But, since the declining trends started before screening was introduced and occurred also in non-screened age groups, improved cancer treatments such as adjuvant chemotherapy and tamoxifen may have been important determinants of breast cancer mortality reduction [
21]. In Catalonia, breast cancer mortality started to decrease at the beginning of the 1990s, concurrent with the dissemination of mammography. Since the effect of screening would be seen some years later, treatments probably had an important role during the 1990s. The contribution of each of these factors still needs to be determined in Catalonia.
Our work was undertaken in the Catalan region and not in the whole country of Spain. This is due to the fact that there is no national cancer registry in Spain. Instead, there are 12 local cancer registries, which show differences in the incidence of breast cancer by region (probably due to different reproductive patterns and degrees of economic development). The only statistics that are collected in a standardized manner at the national level are mortality data. Also, this study is part of a project that aims to assessing the cost-effectiveness of different early detection strategies on the reduction of breast cancer mortality. The cost-effectiveness analysis needs information on outcomes and costs that would be difficult to obtain at the national level. On the other hand, since Catalonia has approximately one sixth of the Spanish population, we believe that some of the results of our studies will be relevant for all of Spain.
This study has several limitations. First, the multi-decrement method that we used assumes independence of causes of death, which means that when breast cancer mortality is removed, the risk of dying due to the remaining causes of death is not affected. This assumption may not be true, since different causes of death may share the same risk factors. For example, body weight, smoking, and diet are associated not only with breast cancer but also with other health problems, like cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, the probability of dying of other causes could change when breast cancer death is removed. In our study, if mortality from other causes had decreased when eliminating breast cancer mortality, the impact of breast cancer mortality would be higher than the reported values. There are methods for competing risks analysis, such as cumulative incidence functions, that do not make any assumptions about independence of risks, but need information on the relationships among them [
22,
23]. These methods are more complex than multi-decrement life tables and have been used to evaluate the effects of explanatory variables, such as assessing the effects of therapy in different groups with multiple endpoints. On the other hand, Chin Long Chiang proposed a method [
24] that takes into account different conditional probabilities of death (crude, net and partial crude) which reflect the relationships among the different risks of death acting simultaneously. Nevertheless, although these methods could be more accurate than the one used in our work, they make assumptions about the risks' associations requiring information that was not available to us such as causes of death for women with breast cancer. Therefore, we chose the multi-decrement method, that Rosenberg also used [
2], because it is simple and adequate to fulfill our objectives.
A second limitation concerns quality of information. The validity of population and mortality data has increased over time, but there may be errors in data from the earliest years of the study. We observed some fluctuations in the late 1930s and early 1940s, coinciding with the Spanish Civil War, a problem that could be addressed by smoothing the life table series' before using them in subsequent analyses. Also, to minimize variability we aggregated data in 5-year age groups and calendar years. The quality of mortality statistics has also changed over time, but different studies have shown that in Spain, deaths from cancer as a whole and leading cancer sites (lung, colon-rectum, prostate, stomach, pancreas, female breast, uterus, brain, leukemia, lymphomas and myeloma) were properly coded [
25,
26]. Furthermore, breast cancer mortality data was provided by the Catalan Mortality Registry which, since the beginning of the 1980s, collects data and codes causes of death consistently and has adequate quality standards.
A third limitation arises from the assumptions made when completing information on breast cancer mortality probabilities for years without available data. Data from available years seemed adequate to us to fit an age-cohort model that predicted missing information. Other approximations such as the assumption that the probabilities of dying from breast cancer at a given age would be the same in neighboring years with data, as Rosenberg did, do not change the main results (data not shown). In any case, extrapolated data for the earlier cohorts may differ from the actual values and therefore results based on these data should be interpreted with caution.
In summary, we obtained cohort life tables for causes of death other than breast cancer in Catalonia (Spain). This makes it possible to quantify the impact of removing breast cancer on overall mortality in different age groups and birth cohorts (
). As with the US results, our analysis found that the greatest impact of breast cancer mortality on overall mortality was for women aged 40–54 born in the middle of the 20
th century. The multi-decrement life tables method also provided estimations of the risk of dying from competing risks that will be used in the assessment of the effect of mammography screening on breast cancer mortality.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors' contributions
MR, EV, MC, RP and JAE participated in design and coordination of the study. EV and MR performed the statistical analysis and drafted the manuscript. RG provided mortality data and contributed to the interpretation of results. MM developed the age-cohort model for breast cancer mortality. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.