Estimating cure and risk of death from other causes of cancer patients: EUROCARE-6 data on head & neck, colorectal, and breast cancers

Background: To estimate net survival and cancer cure fraction (CF), i.e. the proportion of patients no longer at risk of dying from cancer progression/relapse, a clear distinction needs to be made between mortality from cancer and from other causes. Conventionally, CF is estimated assuming no excess mortality compared to the general population. Methods: A new modelling approach, that corrects for patients’ extra risk of dying (RR) from causes other than the diagnosed cancer, was considered to estimate both indicators. We analysed EUROCARE-6 data on head and neck (H&N), colorectal, and breast cancer patients aged 40–79, diagnosed from 1998 to 2002 and followed-up to 31/12/2014, provided by 65 European cancer registries. Findings: Young male H&N cancer patients have 4 times the risk of dying from other causes than their peers, this risk decreases with age to 1.6. Similar results were observed for female. We observed an absolute increase in CF of 30 % using the new model instead of the conventional one. For colorectal cancer, CF with the new model increased by a maximum of 3 % for older patients and the RR ranged from 1 to 1.2 for both sexes. CF of female breast cancer ranged from 73 % to 79 % using the new cure model, with RR between 1.2 and 1.4. Interpretation: Not considering a RR> 1 leads to underestimate the proportion of patients not bound to die of their diagnosed cancer. Estimates of cancer mortality risk have an important impact on patients’ quality of life.