Survival patterns among younger women with breast cancer: the effects of age, race, stage, and treatment.

Several hundred studies of breast cancer survival are published each year; yet few of them include women under the age of 50, and almost none of them specifically examine prognosis among women in their 20s through 40s. The few published reports that analyze survival after breast cancer among these young patients do not provide a consistent or definitive description of their survival experience. The National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program offers a unique opportunity to analyze breast cancer survival in depth among younger women. In this report, survival patterns of all black and white women diagnosed with breast cancer between 1983 and 1989, aged 20 and older, microscopically confirmed, and undergoing surgery, in the SEER program have been analyzed. There are 77,368 women included in this study, 92.8% of whom were white. Less than 1% (562 patients) of these breast cancer patients were between the ages of 20 and 29, 6.5% (5062 patients) were 30-39, and 15.2% (11,789 patients) were 40-49. Survival was calculated utilizing a mixture model to evaluate the cause-specific hazards of dying of breast cancer versus dying of other causes of death. We investigated the hazard of dying of breast cancer versus other causes of death by age at diagnosis, year of diagnosis, extent of disease and diagnosis, and treatment. Stage was stratified into three categories: 1) cases with no axillary lymph node involvement, 2) cases with axillary lymph node involvement, and 3) cases with distant metastases.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)