Author's reply to: 'Detection by screening introduces biases into survival estimates for luminal A-like breast cancer patients'

摘要

We thank Bucchi et al. for their letter raising the point of a potential screening effect in our findings of age-specific effects for luminal A-like breast cancer survival.2 They report an interesting protective effect of screening on luminal A-like breast cancer death in middle-aged women (45-74 years), compared to symptomatically detected women.Our analysis compared age and subtype effects across a wider age span (20-89 years) for risk of breast cancer-specific death. A key finding of our analysis was that elderly women had a consistently increased mortality across all subtypes, which was not explained by tumour subtype, grade, tumour stage or treatment, indicating that suboptimal treatment or comorbidities may play an important role among the elderly.