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Previous Volume 356:1670-1674 April 19, 2007 Number 16 Next

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ABSTRACT

An initial analysis of data from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries shows that the age-adjusted incidence rate of breast cancer in women in the United States fell sharply (by 6.7%) in 2003, as compared with the rate in 2002. Data from 2004 showed a leveling off relative to the 2003 rate, with little additional decrease. Regression analysis showed that the decrease began in mid-2002 and had begun to level off by mid-2003. A comparison of incidence rates in 2001 with those in 2004 (omitting the years in which the incidence was changing) showed that the decrease in annual age-adjusted incidence was 8.6% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6.8 to 10.4). The decrease was evident only in women who were 50 years of age or older and was more evident in cancers that were estrogen-receptor–positive than in those that were estrogen-receptor–negative. The decrease in breast-cancer incidence seems to be temporally related to the first report of the Women's Health Initiative and the ensuing drop in the use of hormone-replacement therapy among postmenopausal women in the United States. The contributions of other causes to the change in incidence seem less likely to have played a major role but have not been excluded.

Source Information

From the Department of Biostatistics, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston (P.M.R., D.A.B.); the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (K.A.C., N.H., E.J.F., B.K.E.) and the Division of Cancer Prevention (C.D.B.), National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD; and the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor–UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA (R.T.C.).

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A Decline in Breast-Cancer Incidence
Bluming A. Z., Elfenbein G. J., Kliewer E. V., Demers A. A., Nugent Z. J., Zahl P.-H., Mæhlen J., Cady B., Chung M. A., Michaelson J. S., Robbins A. S., Clarke C. A., Signorello L. B., Tarone R. E., Ravdin P. M., Cronin K. A., Chlebowski R. T.
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N Engl J Med 2007; 357:509-513, Aug 2, 2007. Correspondence

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