When it comes to health, inequalities can be seen at every level for women with breast cancer: prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and survival. But what about their quality of life? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Inserm, and Gustave Roussy has tracked nearly 6,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer over a 2-year period, showing that socioeconomic status has a major and lasting impact on their quality of life, despite identical medical treatment. These results from the CANTO study, published in the , call for socioeconomic factors to be taken into greater account in for women with breast cancer.
Social and economic determinants (such as income and educational levels) impact how individuals cope with illness and are one of the main causes of inequalities in health. In , socioeconomic inequalities are present throughout the continuum of care, from prevention to diagnosis, treatment, and survival. "However, the extent of socioeconomic inequalities in the quality of life of women diagnosed with breast cancer and how these change during treatment was not known," explains José Sandoval, an oncologist at the HUG Department of Oncology and a researcher in the Departments of Medicine and Community Health and Medicine at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, first author of this study.
"We sought to quantify the inequalities in quality of life for these women, both at the time of diagnosis and in the following two years." Nea.