VENUSCANCER: advancing global understanding of women’s cancer care

Luxembourg contributes data to a large-scale study on women’s cancer treatment inequalities

• Department of Precision Health
• Public Health Expertise

A recent publication in the leading medical journal The Lancet contributes to the understanding of worldwide variations in cancer care. Luxembourg’s National Cancer Registry (RNC) contributed to the study providing high-resolution breast cancer data.

The publication, released in the context of the VENUSCANCER project, focused on three of the most common cancers in women: breast, cervix and ovarian cancer. The study took into account over 100 cancer registries from 39 countries worldwide, for over 250.000 women diagnosed between 2015 and 2018. Data included cancer stage at diagnosis, staging procedures, treatment types, and biomarkers.

The VENUSCANCER project is an initiative embedded in the larger CONCORD Programme, with the goal of collecting evidence intended to inform health policies, ultimately to decrease mortality from these cancers. With a population-based database larger than previous high-resolution studies, the project provides a real world overview of global patterns of care.

The recent paper investigates reasons for global differences in survival of patients diagnosed with those cancers, including data from low and middle-income countries. The results also inform about access to treatment for early-stage tumors, reinforcing the importance of early cancer detection efforts. The study highighted that international agreement on clinical guidelines is crucial, but guidelines need to be tailored to the local needs and resources. Indeed, although guideline-consistent treatment has become more accessible for women diagnosed with early-stage tumours in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), the proportion of these women diagnosed early remains far too low compared to high-income countries (HICs). Moreover, women aged between 70 and 99 years had lower odds of receiving initial treatment consistent with clinical guidelines than women aged 50–69 years, both in HICs and LMICs, with the time between diagnosis and treatment for early-stage cancers being less than 1 month in several HICs, but up to 4 months for cervical and ovarian cancers in some LMICs, and up to 1 year for breast cancer in countries such as Mongolia.

We are proud of Luxembourg’s first contribution to such a global picture of cancer care for women’s cancers, highlighting the high quality of breast cancer care delivered in Luxembourg as well as the high-quality of Luxembourg’s National Cancer Registry data and expertise. Although the global findings point to a clear inequality in terms of female cancer care in lower income countries, the work of population-based cancer registries is increasingly being recognised as a powerful tool to inform health policies and, eventually, close the gap

says Dr. Claudine Backes, scientific director of the RNC and head of the Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention (EPICAN) group at the Department of Precision Health (DoPH), and part of the VENUSCANCER Working Group.

The study received funding from a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. It was published with the full title “Global variation in patterns of care and time to initial treatment for breast, cervical, and ovarian cancer from 2015 to 2018 (VENUSCANCER): a secondary analysis of individual records for 275 792 women from 103 population-based cancer registries in 39 countries and territories” and can be accessed here.