Identification of recurrences in women with early breast cancer
Breast cancer is the commonest cancer in the UK, with around 55,000 women diagnosed annually. Information is routinely available on breast cancer mortality via the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service. However, information on recurrence in women diagnosed with early invasive breast cancer is not collected reliably in England and is available only via individual follow-up, for example in clinical trials.
Reliable recurrence information in routine care would be helpful for many purposes, including:
- healthcare policy-making – where it would be helpful in guiding decisions on optimal follow-up
- clinical management – in clinical decision aids
- randomised trials – enabling low-cost long-term follow-up
- for descriptive and analytical epidemiology.
We used a database compiled by the West Midlands Cancer Intelligence Unit during 1997-2011 to develop and train a deterministic algorithm to identify recurrences in routinely collected data available within NHS England. We trained the algorithm further and evaluated its performance using data from women who were recruited into the AZURE randomised trial during 2003-2006 and invited to approximately 24 clinic follow-up visits over ten years. We then evaluated its performance using data for the remaining 1930 women in England in the AZURE trial.
The findings demonstrate the potential of routinely collected data to identify breast cancer recurrences in England.
- Probert J, Dodwell D, Broggio J, Coleman R, Marshall H, Darby SC, Mannu G. Identification of recurrences in women diagnosed with early invasive breast cancer using routinely collected data in England. BJC Reports 2025.
This page will be updated with further information on the use of the algorithm as it becomes available.
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