Breast Cancer Treatment Is Delayed By One-Third Of Young Women

(CTN News) – In a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Breast Cancer Surgeons held in Orlando, Florida from April 6 to 10, researchers reported that a significant proportion of young women with breast cancer experience diagnostic delay, mostly due to patient factors.

As part of the study, Katherine Fleshner, M.D., from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and colleagues examined the diagnostic timeline among a cohort of 40-year-old women with breast cancer and identified predictors of diagnostic delay. One thousand fourteen hundred and eighty patients were included in the study over the course of five years.

As a result of the study, the researchers found that 36.8 percent of participants had family members who had cancer in the first degree.

According to the survey, 89% of the patients (89.0 percent) had symptoms that prompted an examination, the most common symptom being a palpable mass (77.3 percent). In general, patients reported waiting two weeks on average before seeking medical attention, with a third of participants experiencing a delay in seeking medical attention.

There are several reasons why patients are not receiving care in a timely manner, including an absence of concern, a waiting period before menstruation, reassurance from another practitioner, difficulties accessing care, and competing priorities.

Patients who present with the presenting symptom of a painful lump and who have a first-degree relative with breast cancer are independent predictors of delay in diagnosis of breast cancer.

The system delay, on the other hand, was experienced by 10.1% of participants in the study. It was found that there were no independent predictors of system delay that could be identified.

The incidence of premenopausal breast cancer is low, but the urgency of accelerating the diagnostic process is extremely important, according to Fleshner.

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