Population based survival of female breast cancer cases in Riyadh Region, Saudi Arabia.

Breast cancer is the most frequent tumor among Saudi women, accounting to 19.8% of female cancers. The present study was conducted to determine 5-year survival for all cases of invasive breast cancer that occurred during 1994-96 in the province of Riyadh (n=316). The overall observed survival probability of the study population at 1, 3 and 5 years was 93.9%, 79.2% and 59.6%, respectively. The 5 year survivals for the younger (< 40 years), older (50 + years) and 40-49 years patients were 60.6%, 51.6% and 69.2% respectively, the differences not reaching statistical significance. While there was not a great deal of variation in the 5-year survival between cases with regional (55.6%), distant metastasis (57.6%) and extent of disease unknown (56.7%) cases, localized (67.5%) cases had a clearly better prognosis. An increased but not significant hazard was seen for the cases with regional and distant metastasis disease, 1.40 and 1.11 respectively, compared to localized cases. The 5-year survival for duct carcinomas (62.8%) was greater than for adenocarcinomas (55.6%) and lobular carcinomas (50.0%).