Early- and late-onset breast cancer types among women in the United States and Japan.

BACKGROUND

Although differences in breast cancer incidence among Occidental and Asian populations are often attributed to variations in environmental exposures and/or lifestyle, fewer studies have systematically examined the effect of age-related variations.

METHODS

To further explore age-related geographic breast cancer variations, we compared age-specific incidence patterns among cases of female invasive breast cancer from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program and the Osaka Cancer Registry (1978-1997).

RESULTS

In SEER, there were 236,130 Whites, 21,137 Blacks, and 3,304 Japanese-Americans in Hawaii with invasive breast cancer. In Osaka, there were 25,350 cases. Incidence rates per 100,000 woman-years ranged from 87.6 among Whites to 21.8 in Osaka. Age-specific incidence rates increased rapidly until age 50 years for all race/ethnicity groups, and then continued to increase more slowly for Whites, Blacks, and Japanese-Americans in Hawaii but plateaud for Osaka. Age-specific incidence rates in SEER reflected bimodal (early-onset and late-onset) breast cancer populations, whereas Osaka had only an early-onset age distribution. These age-specific differences in incidence among SEER and Osaka persisted after adjustment for calendar-period and birth-cohort effects using age-period-cohort models.

CONCLUSIONS

Results confirm striking age-specific differences among Occidental and native Japanese breast cancer populations, probably due to complex age-related biological and/or environmental variations among Occidental and Asian breast cancer populations.