Aim: The aim of the study is to see if differences exist in survival between high-income countries for a number of gastrointestinal cancers.
Method: Using cancer registry data from 6 high income countries, the incidence, mortality and survival was calculated and compared to investigate variation for oesophageal, stomach, colon, rectal and pancreatic cancers.
The countries include the United Kingdom, Norway, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia (Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales). For this abstract only data from Western Australia will be identifiable and the other countries will be anonymised. Patients were eligible if their cancer was diagnosed between January 1995 and December 2014 with follow up until 31/12/2015.
Results: The data for the 6 countries have been submitted to IARC and are currently being analysed. We will report the Western Australian data for incidence, mortality and age standardised 5-year net survival in 5 year cohorts from 1995 to 2014 for these 5 gastro-intestinal cancers. We will also report the age standardised 5-year net survival for the 6 anonymised countries by cancer site. Preliminary data indicate maximum difference between countries for the 5-year net survival is 7% for oesophageal cancer, 12% for stomach cancer, 12% for colon cancer, 9% for rectal cancer, and 7% for pancreatic cancer.
Conclusion: For gastrointestinal cancers there are differences in survival between high-income countries. The ICBP is exploring reasons for the disparity through identifying differences in health systems, cancer pathways, access to diagnostics and cancer clinical guidelines.