Underuse of long-term routine hospital follow-up care in patients with a history of breast cancer?

BMC Cancer

Research Article

Michael Schaapveld¹  Geertruida H De Bock²  Wenli Lu³  Peter C Baas⁴  Theo Wiggers⁵  Liesbeth Jansen⁵ 

[1] Comprehensive Cancer Centre North-Netherlands, The Netherlands;Department of Epidemiology, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;Department of Epidemiology, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;Department of Health Statistics, School of Public Health, Tianjin Medical University, China;Department of Epidemiology, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, China;Department of Surgery, Martiniziekenhuis, The Netherlands;Department of Surgery, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;

关键词: Breast neoplasm;    Utilization;    Follow-up;    Mammography;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2407-11-279

 received in 2010-11-27, accepted in 2011-06-28,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAfter primary treatment for breast cancer, patients are recommended to use hospital follow-up care routinely. Long-term data on the utilization of this follow-up care are relatively rare.MethodsInformation regarding the utilization of routine hospital follow-up care was retrieved from hospital documents of 662 patients treated for breast cancer. Utilization of hospital follow-up care was defined as the use of follow-up care according to the guidelines in that period of time. Determinants of hospital follow up care were evaluated with multivariate analysis by generalized estimating equations (GEE).ResultsThe median follow-up time was 9.0 (0.3-18.1) years. At fifth and tenth year after diagnosis, 16.1% and 33.5% of the patients had less follow-up visits than recommended in the national guideline, and 33.1% and 40.4% had less frequent mammography than recommended. Less frequent mammography was found in older patients (age > 70; OR: 2.10; 95%CI: 1.62-2.74), patients with comorbidity (OR: 1.26; 95%CI: 1.05-1.52) and patients using hormonal therapy (OR: 1.51; 95%CI: 1.01-2.25).ConclusionsMost patients with a history of breast cancer use hospital follow-up care according to the guidelines. In older patients, patients with comorbidity and patients receiving hormonal therapy yearly mammography is performed much less than recommended.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Lu et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.